On limited-range strategic/random jamming attacks in wireless ad hoc networks

Jamming attacks are considered one of the most devastating attacks as they are difficult to prevent and sometimes hard to detect. In this paper we consider the impact of the placement and range of limited-range jammers on ad hoc networks. Limited range jammers are more difficult to detect as they use transmission powers similar to that of regular nodes (or perhaps even smaller transmit powers). The attacker can locate his jammer(s) randomly in the network. Alternatively, jammers can be placed at strategic locations. For instance, intuitively, this can be nodes with the highest traffic inputs/outputs (discovered by sensing the traffic flow in the network). Using OPNET, we perform extensive simulations to show how significant such strategically placed attacks can be compared to random placement of limited-range jammers on both TCP and UDP traffic.