Evaluating LoRa and WiFi Jamming

Abstract: Internet of Things changes our world with everything we have around us, our everyday things will be connected to the Internet. According to experts, in two years there will be up to 29 billion devices connected to the Internet. With all of the information that is produced it is important to keep the communication secure, otherwise there can be serious problems in the future. Therefore the objective with this study has been to investigate the area of jamming attacks on wireless communication for Internet of Things, more specifically on LoRa and WiFi technologies. This was made by a literature study to research about Internet of Things, the industrial side of it, the two communication technologies and wireless jamming of them. Additionally to this a small scale test bed system consisting of two LoRa nodes (an Arduino and a LoRa gateway), two WiFi nodes (a laptop and router) and a software defined radio frequency jammer (a HackRF One) were set up. Jamming was performed on the system and evaluated form the perspective of a typical industrial Internet of Things scenario. The testing on the system was done by measuring the received signal strength index, round trip time for a message and packet losses. The study showed that the WiFi communication broke down completely while the LoRa communication stood strong up to the jammer. This concluded that LoRa communication is secure for a typical Internet of Things scenario, from this particular jamming device, or a similar one.