JAM: A Jammed-Area Mapping Service for Sensor Networks

Preventing denial-of-service attacks in wireless sensor networks is di#cult primarily because of the limited resources available to network nodes and the ease with which attacks are perpetrated. Rather than jeopardize design requirements which call for simple, inexpensive, mass-producible devices, we propose a coping strategy that detects and maps jammed regions. We describe a mapping protocol for nodes that surround a jammer which allows network applications to reason about the region as an entity, rather than as a collection of broken links and congested nodes. This solution is enabled by a set of design principles: loose group semantics, eager eavesdropping, supremacy of local information, robustness to packet loss and failure, and early use of results. Performance results show that regions can be mapped in 1 -- 5 seconds, fast enough for real-time response. With a moderately connected network, the protocol is robust to failure rates as high as 25 percent