Reactive jamming attacks in multi-radio wireless sensor networks: an efficient mitigating measure by identifying trigger nodes

There exist many studies against reactive jamming attacks, however, these methods, i.e. frequency hopping or channel surfing, require excessive computational capabilities on wireless devices which are serious side effects in wireless sensor networks. To avoid the problems in existing methods, we propose a novel approach against reactive jamming attacks by identifying the trigger nodes, whose transmissions activate any reactive jammers. The identification of these trigger nodes can help us (i) carefully design a better routing protocol by switching these nodes into only receivers to avoid activating jammers and (ii) locate the jammers based on the trigger nodes, thus providing an alternative mechanism against reactive jamming attacks. In this paper, we provide an efficient method to identify the trigger nodes by utilizing the group testing techniques and minimum collection of disjoint disk covers to reduce the message and computational overhead. The theoretical analysis and experimental results show that our solution performs extremely well in terms of time and message complexities, which in turn provides a good approach to defend reactive jamming attacks.