ARES: an anti-jamming reinforcement system for 802.11 networks

Dense, unmanaged 802.11 deployments tempt saboteurs into launching jamming attacks by injecting malicious interference. Nowadays, jammers can be portable devices that transmit intermittently at low power in order to conserve energy. In this paper, we first conduct extensive experiments on an indoor 802.11 network to assess the ability of two physical layer functions, rate adaptation and power control, in mitigating jamming. In the presence of a jammer we find that: (a) the use of popular rate adaptation algorithms can significantly degrade network performance and, (b) appropriate tuning of the carrier sensing threshold allows a transmitter to send packets even when being jammed and enables a receiver capture the desired signal. Based on our findings, we build ARES, an Anti-jamming REinforcement System, which tunes the parameters of rate adaptation and power control to improve the performance in the presence of jammers. ARES ensures that operations under benign conditions are unaffecte...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CONEXT
• Authors: Konstantinos Pelechrinis, Ioannis Broustis, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy, Christos Gkantsidis
• Keywords: Computer Networks, CONEXT 2009, Indoor 802.11 Network, Power Control, Rate Adaptation