A novel jamming detection technique to detect the presence of jamming in the downstream direction for cluster based wireless sensor networks is proposed in this paper. The proposed technique is deployed in base station and in cluster heads. The proposed technique is novel in two aspects: Firstly, whenever a cluster head receives a packet it verifies whether the source node is legitimate node or new node. Secondly if a source node is declared as new node in the first step, then this technique observes the behavior of the new node to find whether the new node is legitimate node or jammed node. In order to monitor the behavior of the existing node and new node, the second step uses two metrics namely packet delivery ratio (PDR) and received signal strength indicator (RSSI). The rationality of using PDR and RSSI is presented by performing statistical test. PDR and RSSI of every member in the cluster is measured and assessed by the cluster head. And finally the cluster head determines whether the members of the cluster are jammed or not. The CH can detect the presence of jamming in the cluster at member level. The base station can detect the presence of jamming in the wireless sensor network at CH level. The simulation result shows that the proposed technique performs extremely well and achieves jamming detection rate as high as 99.85%. © 2015 KSII.