# Clustering-Based Energy-Efficient Self-Healing Strategy for WSNs under Jamming Attacks
## 1 Introduction  
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) facilitate communication, control, and understanding with the surrounding world. Consequently, the WSNs are being deployed in several environments owing to their capabilities [1]. These characteristics, in combination with the possibility of the nodes being connected to the Internet, constitute the base for the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm [2, 3]. A WSN integrates numerous sensors, nodes, routers, and gateways to communicate data along the network. Moreover, any node in the network can access theInternet and be managed remotely. Also, such architecture allows those authorized to reach the network to access the data handled by the nodes [4]. Therefore, the integrity and reliability of the data are crucial to the objectives for which the WSN was created.  
A WSN deals with numerous challenges to guarantee the reliability, energy efficiency, and correctness of the data in the network [5]. Due to the broadcast nature of WSN, attackers take advantage of this to weaken and compromise the network performance [6]. Specifically, the attack strategies that disturb the physical layer (PHY) are detrimental to the data. These types of attacks can be categorized as eavesdropping and jamming. Both attacks aim to take advantage of the data for the convenience of the attacker. Nevertheless, self-healing techniques have been created to overcome and relieve the impact of the attackers on the integrity of the data [7].  
The self-healing techniques take advantage of the properties of WSN, such as rerouting, power allocation, and cooperation, to guarantee the reliability of the network and data. This technique is closely related to the clustering techniques. Both approaches adapt the network topology to ensure reliability, energy efficiency, and data integrity, among other objectives. However, the joint use of these techniques to overcome jamming attacks to guarantee the communications in the network under attackers' scenarios is an unexplored topic. For this reason, this paper proposes a novel approach to overpower the presence of jamming attacks in several scenarios.  
The novel approach uses the strengths of self-healing and clustering techniques to mitigate the intrinsic drawback of each one and guarantee the communications in the network under jamming attacks. Load balance, rerouting, cooperation, and power allocation are used. Then, we compare the energy efficiency and data correctness between several techniques in jamming scenarios. The exhaustive comparative analysis provides valuable insights.  
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a detailed and exhaustive review of the state of the art of works focused on clustering, jamming, and self-healing. Next, the contributions of our work are listed and presented to remark on the findings and contributions to the unexplored topic. Then, Section 3 provides a detailed description of the system model. Next, in Section 4, we discuss the applicability of different clustering strategies under jamming. Later, in Section 5, we describe our novel proposed algorithm to overcome the jamming attacks in the WSN context using different techniques. Then, in Section 6, experimental data is discussed. Consequently, Section 7 discusses, explains, and details the main remarks from the scenarios. Finally, Section 8 concludes the paper and considers some directions for future work.