Jam: A Jammed-Area Mapping Service For Sensor Networks

Preventing denial-of-service attacks in wireless sensor networks is difficult 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.