Experimental Evaluation of Jamming Threat in LoRaWAN

LoRaWAN is a promising solution of Low-power wide area network (LPWAN) operating in unlicensed spectrum to support long range wireless services for Internet of Things (IoTs). However, with the growth of IoT devices deployed in a fixed geographic area, the immunity to interference on the communication increases significantly. Attackers may utilize such situation to jam packet transmission by emitting RF interference signal at the same time when a LoRa end node is sending data to the LoRa gateway. As a consequence, the transmission of the LoRa end node would fail due to collision which would in turn reduce the network performance. In this paper, we implement a LoRa jammer on commercial LoRa devices by modifying the open source and figure out the proper setting of the jammer through three scenarios aiming to evaluate the influence of LoRa transmission configuration on jamming performance. Specifically, the impact of non-orthogonality of LoRa transmission on jamming effect is investigated. Possible countermeasures for LoRaWAN are then presented to alleviate the jamming attacks.