Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) is frequently used in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), specially for critical applications, as it provides high efficiency, reliable performance, guaranteed bandwidth, bounded and predictable latency, and absence of collisions. However, TDMA is easily vulnerable to choosy jamming attacks. In TDMA transmission, all the slots are usually pre-allocated to sensor nodes, and each slot is used by the identical node for a number of consecutive superframes. Hence, an adversary could frustrate a victim node’s communication by simply jamming its slot(s). Such attack turns out to be proficient, energy efficient, and extremely difficult to detect. In this paper, we propose a novel approach JAMMY, a distributed and reliable solution to selective jamming in TDMA-based WSNs. Unlike conventional approaches, JAMMY changes the slot utilization pattern at every superframe, thus making it unpredictable to the adversary. JAMMY is decentralized, as sensor nodes determine the next slot consumption pattern in a distributed and autonomous way. Results from performance analysis of the proposed solution show that JAMMY introduces tiny overhead yet allows many nodes to join the network, in a limited number of superframes.

WSNs, TDMA, Security, Selective Jamming, DoS, Secure Slot Permutation, Decentralized Slot Acquisition

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