JamSense: Interference and Jamming Classification for Low-power Wireless Networks

Low-power wireless networks transmit at low output power and are hence susceptible to cross-technology interference. The latter may cause packet loss which may waste scarce energy resources by requiring the retransmission of packets. Jamming attacks are even more harmful than cross-technology interference in that they may totally prevent packet reception and hence disturb or even disrupt applications. Therefore, it is important to recognize such jamming attacks. In this paper, we present JamSense. JamSense extends SpeckSense, a system that is able to detect multiple sources of interference, with the ability to classify jamming attacks. As SpeckSense, JamSense runs on resource-constrained nodes. Our experimental evaluation on real hardware shows that JamSense is able to identify jamming attacks with high accuracy while not classifying Bluetooth or WiFi interference as jamming attacks.