Fast and energy-efficient technique for jammed region mapping in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have great practical importance for surveillance systems to perform monitoring by acquiring and sending information on any intrusion in a secured area. Requirement of very little human intervention is one of the most desirable features of WSNs, thus making it a cheaper and safer alternative for securing large areas such as international borders. Jamming attacks in WSNs can be applied to disrupt communications among the sensor nodes in the network. Since it is difficult to prevent jamming attacks, detection and mapping out the jammed regions is critical to overcome this problem. In a security monitoring scenario, the network operators will be able to take proper measures against jamming once the jammed regions in the network are known to them. It is also desirable to keep the interactions of the sensor nodes in the network minimal, as they are low powered devices and need to conserve their resources. In this paper we propose a light-weight technique for faster mapping of the jammed regions. We minimize the load on the sensors by removing the actual responsibility of mapping from the network to the central base station (BS). After a few nodes report to the BS, it carries out the task of mapping of the jammed regions in the network. We use our simulation results to compare our proposed system with the existing techniques and also to measure the performance of our system. Our results show that the jammed regions in a network can be mapped from fewer nodes reporting to the base station.