LoRaWAN Performance Evaluation and Resilience under Jamming Attacks

There is an increasing deployment of Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, from smart meters and smart lighting to humidity soil sensors and medical wearable devices. Long Range (LoRa) is one such over-the-air (OTA) transmission IoT standard, having a wide range of applications in smart cities, agriculture and health. It facilitates the inter-connection of services and smooth exchange of information. However, owing to its wireless interface, it is susceptible, as all wireless networks are, to OTA attacks. In this paper, we initially obtain the Bit Error Rate (BER) and Packet Error Rate (PER) of LoRa, in order to investigate the impact of continuous and reactive jamming attacks on it. We show that overall, LoRa can achieve a good performance even under a jamming attack, subject to parameters such as the transmit power, the Spreading Factor (SF) and the Coding Rate (CR). Moreover, it is proven that the impact on BER and PER is similar irrespective of whether the attack occurs with total frame synchronization or is synchronized to after the preamble transmission. Lastly, we apply a detection scheme, based on previous values of Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and PER to successfully identify malicious attacks.