Estimating delay in a data forwarding scheme for defending jamming attack in wireless sensor network

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have emerged as an important application area resulting from the advancement of efficient short-range radio communication and miniaturization of computing devices. Nodes in such a network generally remain in an unattended environment and thereby they are prone to attack by adversaries. Therefore, the need of defending such attacks is of utmost importance. This paper presents a data forwarding scheme to defend jamming attack in WSN. The attack is defended at the cost of an affordable delay. The scheme considers a multi-level tier architecture based on clustering of nodes in each tier. Further the work identifies the parameters causing delay in presence of attack and analyses the impact of the parameter values in estimating delay. We claim that delay is affordable as it is independent of number of attacked-nodes rather it depends on number of tiers where attacked-node(s) belong. The claim is justified with proof.