Osanaiye, OpeyemiAlfa, Attahiru SuleHancke, Gerhard P.2019-07-042019-07-042018-05-24Osanaiye, O., Alfa, A.S. & Hancke, G.P. 2018, 'A statistical approach to detect jamming attacks in wireless sensor networks', Sensors, vol. 18, art. 1691, pp. 1-15.1424-8220 (onlne)10.3390/s18061691http://hdl.handle.net/2263/70371Wireless 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.en© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.Jamming attackInter-arrival timeWireless sensor network (WSN)Exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA)Sensor nodesTrace driven simulationStatistical approachResource constraintRadiofrequency signalsStatistical process controlMilitary applicationsDenial-of-service attackArticle