Low-power DoS attacks in data wireless LANs and countermeasures

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the resiliency to jamming of data protocols, such as IP, over WLAN. We show that, on existing WLAN, an adversary can successfully jam data packets at a very low energy cost. Such attacks allow a set of adversary nodes disseminated over an area to prevent communication, partition an ad hoc network, or force packets to be routed over adversary chosen paths. The ratio of the jamming pulses duration to the transmission duration can be as low as 10--4. We investigate and analyze the performance of using various coding schemes to improve the robustness of wireless LANs for IP packets transmission. A concatenated code that is simple to decode and can maintain a low Frame Error Rate (FER) under a jamming effort ratio of 15%. We argue that LDPC codes will be very suitable to prevent this type of jamming. We investigate the theoretical limits by analyzing the performance derived from upper bounds on binary error-control codes. We also propose an efficient anti-jamming technique for IEEE802.11b.