A jamming defending data-forwarding scheme for delay sensitive applications in WSN

Wireless sensor network (WSN) has emerged as an important application area where nodes are generally placed in an unattended environment and therefore are vulnerable to attack by adversaries. Moreover in real time application domains delay even by fraction of a second may deceive the purpose of the application. Therefore, designing an attack-defending scheme for WSN without involving any additional delay in data-forwarding is an important challenge in this domain. The present work proposes a data-forwarding scheme having no additional delay to defend jamming attack in WSN. The scheme considers a multilayer architecture where the layers are made up of hexagonal cells each containing sensor nodes in the form of clusters. The nodes are randomly deployed throughout the network and clusters are formed so that every cell hosts two sets of clusters operating in two different predefined frequencies. We have provided design guideline to determine cell size in terms of network parameters. This guideline ensures that for a cluster head there is at least another cluster head at one-hop distance towards the sink and thereby ensures data-forwarding in shortest path. During data-forwarding, if a frequency is jammed, the cluster operating in that frequency becomes inoperative and the other cluster acts as back-up. We claim that the scheme defends jamming attack without incurring any additional delay and the claim is substantiated through simulation.