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.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a key technology to interconnect the real and digital worlds, enabling the development of smart cities and services. The timely collection of data is essential for IoT services. In scenarios such as agriculture, industry, transportation, public safety, and health, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play a fundamental role in fulfilling this task. However, WSNs are commonly deployed in sensitive and remote environments, thus facing the challenge of jamming attacks. Therefore, these networks need to have the ability to detect such attacks and adopt countermeasures to guarantee connectivity and operation. In this work, we propose a novel clustering-based self-healing strategy to overcome jamming attacks, in which we denominate fairness cooperation with power allocation (FCPA). The proposed strategy, aware of the presence of the jammer, clusters the network and designates a cluster head that acts as a sink node to collect information from its cluster. Then, the most convenient routes to overcome the jamming are identified and the transmit power is adjusted to the minimum value required to guarantee the reliability of each link. Finally, through the weighted use of the relays, the lifetime of each subnetwork is extended. To show the impact of each capability of FCPA, we compare it with multiple benchmarks that only partially possess these capabilities. In the proposal evaluation, we consider a WSN composed of 64 static nodes distributed in a square area. Meanwhile, to assess the impact of the jamming attack, we consider seven different locations of the attacker. All experiments started with each node’s battery full and stopped after one of these batteries was depleted. In these scenarios, FCPA outperforms all other strategies by more than 50% of the information transmitted, due to the efficient use of relay power, through the weighted balance of cooperative routes. On average, FCPA permits 967,961 kb of information transmitted and 63% of residual energy, as energy efficiency, from all the analyzed scenarios. Additionally, the proposed clustering-based self-healing strategy adapts to the change of jammer location, outperforming the rest of the strategies in terms of information transmitted and energy efficiency in all evaluated scenarios.