A jamming attack detection technique for opportunistic networks

Abstract Opportunistic networks (OppNets) are dispersed in nature, with nodes acting as resource restrictions, with intermittent connectivity. These nodes are subject to various types of attacks, posing a security risk in data transmission. One of the most common attacks that cause jamming among the message forwarding nodes in infrastructure-less networks is Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Most of the methods addressing this type of attack rely on cryptographic algorithms, which are too difficult to implement. In this paper, a novel jamming attack detection technique (JADT) for OppNets, is proposed, which relies on the use of some statistical measures collected from the relay nodes and a prescribed threshold on the packet delivery ratio (PDR) to discover a jamming attack while decrypting the acknowledgement, stopping the message transmission and rebroadcasting the message through a different channel. The proposed JADT is evaluated using the ONE simulator, showing its superiority against the Fuzzy Geocasting mechanism in Opportunistic Networks (F-GSAF) scheme in terms of packet delivery ratio and overhead ratio, under varying TTL and buffer size.