R-TSCH: Proactive Jamming Attack Protection for IEEE 802.15.4-TSCH Networks
Dimitrios Zorbas, Panayiotis Kotzanikolaou, Christos Douligeris · 2018
Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) has been proposed in various wireless protocols as a solution to combat external interference, path-loss fading and static jamming attacks. However, since TSCH algorithms generate a deterministic and periodic pattern of channel hops, they are still subject to jamming attacks. Proactive randomization of the channel generation process could provide a good solution against jamming attacks, however due to the strict time constraints of the timeslots, practical solutions should be very efficient. In this paper, we propose R-TSCH, a randomized radio channel generation algorithm that can be used to proactively protect wireless nodes from jamming attacks. Based on a cryptographic hash function and a secret key, R-TSCH produces a new pseudo-random channel sequence, which looks as truly random to anyone who has no access to the key. Our simulation results show that the attacked links of the TSCH network enhanced with the proposed mechanism can achieve an over 90% Packet Reception Rate (PRR) in presence of multiple jammers.