On the Performance of IEEE 802.11 under Jamming

Abstract

Abstract-In this paper, we study the performance of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol under a range of jammers that covers both channel-oblivious and channel-aware jamming. We study two channel-oblivious jammers: a periodic jammer that jams deterministically at a specified rate, and a memoryless jammer whose signals arrive according to a Poisson process. We also develop new models for channel-aware jamming, including a reactive jammer that only jams non-colliding transmissions and an omniscient jammer that optimally adjusts its strategy according to current states of the participating nodes.Our study comprises of a theoretical analysis of the saturation throughput of 802.11 under jamming, an extensive simulation study, and a testbed to conduct real world experimentation of jamming IEEE 802.11 using GNU Radio and USRP platform. In our theoretical analysis, we use a discrete-time Markov chain analysis to derive formulae for the saturation throughput of IEEE 802.11 under memoryless, reactive and omniscient jamming. One of our key results is a characterization of optimal omniscient jamming that establishes a lower bound on the saturation throughput of 802.11 under arbitrary jammer attacks. We validate the theoretical analysis by means of Qualnet simulations. Finally, we measure the real-world performance of periodic and memoryless jammers using our GNU radio jammer prototype.

A systematic learning method for optimal jamming

“…In this paper, we consider the feedback to be in terms of the error rates SER and P ER which is inherently a function of the jamming signal j(t). Notice that the jammer can estimate the error rates by only observing the acknowledgment /no acknowledgement (ACK/NACK) packets that are exchanged between the transmitter-receiver pair 1 [16].…”

Jamming-based adversarial control of network flow allocation: A passivity approach

“…Jamming attacks and mitigation strategies have been studied in both security and control research communities [5], [10]. Impact of jamming at the physical layer in terms of bit error rate has been studied in [2], and analysis of jamming impact on higher layers including media access control (MAC) and network layers has been studied in [5], [9].…”

“…Impact of jamming at the physical layer in terms of bit error rate has been studied in [2], and analysis of jamming impact on higher layers including media access control (MAC) and network layers has been studied in [5], [9]. Existing jamming mitigation strategies are diversitybased mechanisms that utilize either the channel diversity in the frequency domain [2] or spatial diversity in the network [9].…”

“…The feasibility of jamming attack to redirect the network flow into adversarial region, thus exposing the redirected traffic to higher-layer attacks, have been introduced in [4], [5], [6]. Currently, however, there exists no analytical framework to study the feasibility and efficient jamming strategies for the flow redirection attacks.…”

“…This approach mitigates the attack by leveraging the spatial diversity provided by multiple disjoint paths. Intelligent adversaries may exploit this behavior, however, by jamming specific links in order to redirect traffic to nodes that collude with, or have been compromised by, an adversary [4], [5]. Once a sufficient amount of network flow traverses these compromised or colluding nodes, an adversary can mount effective, stealthy attacks on higher-layer services, including man-in-the-middle attacks [5], [6] that can violate the real-time constraints P. Lee of cyber-physical systems [7].…”