# On Localized Countermeasure Against Reactive Jamming Attacks in Smart Grid Wireless Mesh Networks
## 1 Introduction  
The Smart Grid propels the transition from the traditional and conventional electrical power grid into the modern grid by solving the issues of increasing demand on electrical energy, unidirectional power/information delivery, energy wastage and resilience on the power grids. The dramatic transition over the demand on the electrical energy from the tremendous and rapid increasing number of electronic devices since 1970 has caused the increasingly serious energy shortage and carbon emission in power systems. Furthermore, the existing power grids struggle with other challenges from the depletion of fossil fuel, such as reliability of the aging infrastructures and even security issues. However, the advent of Smart Grid paradigm has appeared as a promising model of advanced power grid that would be constructed over the existing grid with a variety of information and communication technologies. The Smart Grid realized by bi-directional communication technologies would achieve the improvement of the effectiveness, efficiency, reliability, security, sustainability, stability and scalability over the traditional power grid systems [1]. The Smart Grid differentiates itself from the conventional grid not only in several benefits but also in security aspects. First of all, a bi-directional communication between service providersand consumers in the Smart Grid would drastically reduce electrical energy wastage by Demand Response (DR) service, such as real-time pricing and power consumption scheduling. Such efficiency on electricity consumption could achieve improvement on power quality but would inevitably result in the expansion of threat vectors to the advanced grid [2]. Secondly, the modern grid networks built with a wide range of various communication mediums and protocols deliver critical control messages as well as information, which shifts the order of the security triad from Credentiality, Integrity and Availability (CIA) in the Internet into AIC. In the Industrial Control Systems (ICS) domain, such as the Smart Grid, the destabilization of assets is the most critical security threat caused by the unauthorized acquisition of proprietary information in the Internet [3]. Consequently, the increasingly prevalent networked power infrastructure with the operational technologies would be the primary security target; it would compromise the resilience and robustness of the system, but the security approaches for the knowledge-based systems would not be able to guarantee the survivability of the grid. There are various kinds of Denial-of-Service (DoS) threats, among which, jamming attacks have been known as the most significant threats because of their effectiveness and lethal damage against wireless networks in [4]. In a jamming attack, malice disseminates out adversarial signals into busy channels which are filled with legitimate device transmissions without following any legitimate protocols. This will result in the slump of the Signal-to-Noise ratio (S/N) and the performance of throughput in the networks. This light weight wireless DoS attack is favored and convenient to launch due to the fact that the jammers do not have to breach into the wireless networks in order to exploit the structural configurations on the critical networks. In the scope of wireless DoS attacks, reactive jamming poses the maximum threats while requiring the lowest attacker energy against the networks. In essence, the reactive jamming attack is the most efficient attack strategy and it is extremely difficult to be discovered, in which a malicious node (jammer) quietly scans all the available channels to sense any activity and blatantly starts injecting adversarial signal on that channel. Especially, in accordance with [PERSON] and et al. in [1], wireless mesh networks become both an economical and efficient communication approach to be employed in order to monitor and control the tremendous number of field devices in the Smart Grid.