Speaker:Elisabeth Kusuma Adi Permatasari

Attack-resilient Channel Hopping for WirelessHART

Reliable and real-time communication between sensors and actuators is a precursor in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. Time synchronized channel hopping (TSCH) is a key feature in existing IIoT wireless standards such as WirelessHART for reliable communication. The current hopping strategy in WirelessHART utilizes a predefined channel sequence which requires sender-receiver pairs to compute the channels using a modular function prior to communication. As the sequence length is limited by the total number of channels, the function produces a strong repetitive channel usage. Consequently, a jammer is able to derive the channel usage through a small effort by listening to the active links without knowing the original sequence. Additionally, adopting harmonic superframe lengths also makes channel cracking easier. Existing channel hopping strategies in other wireless domains are not designed to meet high reliability and real-time requirements of WirelessHART networks. A channel hopping for WirelessHART network must guarantee fast switching (within 0.192 ms), channel synchronization between senders and receivers, and interference-free concurrent transmissions. In this work, an attack-resilient channel hopping mechanism that meets these requirements is proposed. Our approach significantly reduces the strong repetitive pattern in channel sequence by adding randomness at multiple levels. We have implemented our approach and evaluated through testbed experiments and also through simulations in Cooja. The results show that our proposed approach can significantly lower a jammer’s capability in making correct channel prediction without increasing the channel hopping overhead from the current approach.

Committee: Wensheng Zhang (major professor), Abusayeed Saifullah and Ying Cai.

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