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A solution to the GTS-based selective jamming attack on IEEE 802.15.4 networks

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Abstract

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard allows devices to access the medium not only in contention mode but also in a contention-free way, in order to support quality of service (QoS). In contention-free mode, devices access the medium according to the guaranteed time slot (GTS) mechanism, which is vulnerable to the selective jamming attack. This is a particularly insidious form of denial of service that allows an attacker to thwart QoS while limiting her own exposure at the minimum. In this paper, we present selective jamming resistant GTS , a solution against the GTS-based selective jamming. We also show that our solution is standard compliant and affordable for resource-scarce devices like Tmote Sky motes.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the EU FP7 Network of Excellence CONET (Grant Agreement FP7-224053); the EU FP7 Integrated Project PLANET (Grant agreement FP7-257649); and the TENACE PRIN (No. 20103P34XC) funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research. We would like to thank Mário Alves and Ricardo Severino from ISEP, for the useful feedback received during the early stages of this work and the standard GTS implementation for TinyOS. A special thank goes to Alessandro Pischedda, for his help in the final stages of this work. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers for having helped us to improve our work with their precious comments and advices.

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  1. Dipartimento di Ingegneria della Informazione, Elettronica, Informatica, Telecomunicazioni, University of Pisa, Via Diotisalvi 2, 56122, Pisa, Italy

    Roberta Daidone, Gianluca Dini & Marco Tiloca

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  1. Roberta Daidone
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  2. Gianluca Dini
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  3. Marco Tiloca
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Correspondence to Marco Tiloca.

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Daidone, R., Dini, G. & Tiloca, M. A solution to the GTS-based selective jamming attack on IEEE 802.15.4 networks. Wireless Netw 20, 1223–1235 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-013-0673-y

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