Evaluating DoS jamming attack on reactive routing protocol in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) over the years have emerged as the enabling underlining infrastructure for new wireless technology trends such as Internet-of Things (IoT) and Fog Computing. Its application has spread across diverse fields such as agriculture, military, healthcare and home automation. Despite its promising attributes, it is characterized by its extremely limited resources such as battery energy and memory. Additionally, its deployment in hostile and unattended areas make it vulnerable to security attacks. One of such attacks is the denial of service (DoS) jamming attack that is perpetrated by malicious nodes emitting radio frequency signals to disrupt and interfere with the normal functions of the sensor nodes in the network. This eventually causes a denial of service in the network. Different routing protocols have been proposed over the years to guarantee reliable communication and maintain the network lifetime and functionality for a reasonable duration, notwithstanding DoS jamming attack. Therefore, in this work, we evaluate the effect of a constant jamming DoS attack on two key reactive routing protocols in WSN, ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) and dynamic source routing (DSR). Metrics such as packet sending ratio (PSR), packet loss (PL) and transmitted packets are used to measure the impact of constant jamming DoS attack in the network. Simulation results using network simulation 2 (NS2) and trace graph show that, irrespective of the adopted reactive routing protocol, the impact of the jamming attack is the same.