Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to various security threats. One of the most common types of vulnerability threat is the jamming attack, where the attacker uses the same frequency signals to jam the network transmission. In this paper, an edge node scheme is proposed to address the issue of jamming attack in WSNs. Three edge nodes are used in the deployed area of WSN, which have different transmission frequencies in the same bandwidth. The different transmission frequencies and Round Trip Time (RTT) of transmitting signal makes it possible to identify the jamming attack channel in WSNs transmission media. If an attacker jams one of the transmission channels, then the other two edge nodes verify the media serviceability by means of transmitting information from the same deployed WSNs. Furthermore, the RTT of the adjacent channel is also disturbed from its defined interval of time, due to high frequency interference in the adjacent channels, which is the indication of a jamming attack in the network. The simulation result was found to be quite consistent during analysis by jamming the frequency channel of each edge node in a step-wise process. The detection rate of jamming attacks was about 94% for our proposed model, which was far better than existing schemes. Moreover, statistical analyses were undertaken for field-proven schemes, and were found to be quite convincing compared with the existing schemes, with an average of 6% improvement.
Keywords: WSNs; authentication; bandwidth; edge nodes; frequency division multiplexing; jamming attacks; security.