A Hierarchical Jammed-Area Mapping Service for Ubiquitous Communication in Smart Communities

Smart communities are an emerging communication paradigm that mobilizes physical devices operating in different wireless networks to deliver ubiquitous services. Since wireless communication is vulnerable to physical or link layer jamming, it is essential to map the locations and shapes of jammed regions for adjusting routing policy. However, existing mapping strategies require jammed devices to override the carrier sense multiple access limitation for the declaration of jamming. Besides, the utilization of flat network architectures in existing mapping strategies incurs large communication overhead. In this article, a three-layer hierarchical network structure and a matching top-down mapping mechanism are proposed. Through organizing smart nodes into onehop clusters, the jamming phenomenon can be discovered purely from cluster heads' data reports collected in the sink layer. Each one-hop cluster is also used as a basic mapping unit to identify and measure jammed regions. From cluster-level mapping to sensor-level mapping, jammed areas can be mapped from coarse- to fine-grained. Simulation results demonstrate that the mapping traffic involved in the proposed jammed-area mapping strategy can be reduced substantially.