Abstract:
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), in recent times, have become one of the most promising
network solutions with a wide variety of applications in the areas of agriculture, environment,
healthcare and the military. Notwithstanding these promising applications, sensor nodes in WSNs
are vulnerable to different security attacks due to their deployment in hostile and unattended areas
and their resource constraints. One of such attacks is the DoS jamming attack that interferes and
disrupts the normal functions of sensor nodes in a WSN by emitting radio frequency signals to jam
legitimate signals to cause a denial of service. In this work we propose a step-wise approach using a
statistical process control technique to detect these attacks. We deploy an exponentially weighted
moving average (EWMA) to detect anomalous changes in the intensity of a jamming attack event by
using the packet inter-arrival feature of the received packets from the sensor nodes. Results obtained
from a trace-driven simulation show that the proposed solution can efficiently and accurately detect
jamming attacks in WSNs with little or no overhead.
