Jamming-Aware Simultaneous Multi-Channel Decisions for Opportunistic Access in Delay-Critical IoT-Based Sensor Networks

Cognitive radio (CR) technology is proposed to provide huge spectrum opportunities to enable a large-scale deployment of Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensing-based applications. An important challenge in this domain is how to design efficient channel assignment algorithms for delay-sensitive CRIoT-based sensor networks while being resilient to jamming attacks (the most common threat to IoT network reliability). Such channel assignment algorithms must enable parallel multi-channel transmissions in order to satisfy the imposed quality-of-service and delay requirements of the CRIoT devices while being spectrum efficient. This article introduces a multi-channel batch-based security-aware medium access control (MAC) design proposed for time-critical CRIoT deployments, referred to as BMRJA-MAC. The proposed design aims at improving the overall network performance by serving the largest possible number of CRIoT nodes by utilizing their multi-channel transmission capabilities while being reactive jamming-aware. The performance of the proposed MAC design is validated via simulations and experimentally using the Future Internet-of-Things (FIT) IoT-LAB testbed. Compared with reference protocols, the results show that BMRJA-MAC significantly improves network performance and spectrum efficiency.