Performance Analysis of the IEEE 802.15.4 Protocol for Smart Environments under Jamming Attacks

Jamming attacks in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) scenarios are detrimental to the performance of these networks and affect the security and stability of the service perceived by users. Therefore, the evaluation of the effectiveness of smart environment platforms based on WSNs has to consider the system performance when data collection is executed under jamming attacks. In this work, we propose an experimental testbed to analyze the performance of a WSN using the IEEE 802.15.4 CSMA/CA unslotted mode under jamming attacks in terms of goodput, packet receive rate (PRR), and energy consumption to assess the risk for users and the network in the smart scenario. The experimental results show that constant and reactive jamming strategies severely impact the evaluated performance metrics and the variance' of the received signal strength (RSS) for some signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) ranges. The measurements obtained using the experimental testbed were correlated with analytical models. The results show that in the presence of one interferer, for SINR values higher than 4.5 dB, the PRR is almost 0.99, and the goodput 3.05 Kbps, but the system performance is significantly degraded when the amount of interferers increases. Additionally, the energy efficiency associated with reactive strategies is superior to the constant attack strategy. Finally, based on the evaluated metrics and with the proposed experimental testbed, our findings offer a better understanding of jamming attacks on the sensor devices in real smart scenarios.