Experimental Evaluation of Capture Effect in an IEEE 802.15.4 WSN based on Unslotted-CSMA/CA

Jamming attacks for disrupting legitimate transmissions are currently one of the most used techniques by attackers. These attacks are difficult to detect and have rarely been addressed in IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks (WSNs) based on CSMA/CA, and few experimental scenarios have considered the presence of an attacker in these networks. In this work, we evaluated the impact of the capture effect in an IEEE 802.15.4 WSN based on unslotted-CSMA/CA in the presence of an attacker, considering different values of back-off. We analyze the capture effect for multiple values of SINR and back-off in terms of Packet Reception Rate (PRR) and goodput. For instance, the PRR-to-SINR and the goodput show that for SINR values higher than 4.5dB, the PRR is almost 0.99, and the goodput 3048.38bps, despite the backoff exponent (BE) used value. Based on the evaluated metrics, we provide findings that offer a better understanding of the capture effect under jamming attacks in real scenarios.