Wormhole-Based Anti-Jamming Techniques in Sensor Networks

Due to their very nature, wireless sensor networks are probably the category of wireless networks most vulnerable to “radio channel jamming”-based Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. An adversary can easily mask the events that the sensor network should detect by stealthily jamming an appropriate subset of the nodes; in this way, he prevents them from reporting what they are sensing to the network operator. Therefore, even if an event is sensed by one or several nodes (and the sensor network is otherwise fully connected), the network operator cannot be informed on time. We show how the sensor nodes can exploit channel diversity in order to create wormholes that lead out of the jammed region, through which an alarm can be transmitted to the network operator. We propose three solutions: The first is based on wired pairs of sensors, the second relies on frequency hopping, and the third is based on a novel concept called uncoordinated channel hopping. We develop appropriate mathematical models to study the proposed solutions.