A new anti-jamming strategy for VANET metrics-directed security defense

As Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) becomes a critical infrastructure for road safety and traffic efficiency, its standardization and deployment face serious security challenges. The nature of VANET hinders ineffective most of existing defense schemes for wireless/mobile networks. This paper studies the impact of jamming on 802.11p, the standard of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. Jamming, a category in Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack, is a legacy in wireless communications. Although some detections and countermeasures of jamming-style DoS attacks have been proposed for generic 802.11 wireless local area networks, few is tested for 802.11p. Specifically, retreat strategies fail to mitigate jammers in VANET as geography may prohibit escaping from a jammed area, and the only one control channel for safety critical messages in 802.11p excludes channel hopping. Likewise, competition strategies such as tuning the carrier sense threshold does not respond fast enough to high-speed mobility. This work proposes a hideaway strategy, suitable for antijamming in VANET. The new strategy is perceived with a novel security metrics to measure the effectiveness of jammers, directing the design of defense mechanisms. The strategy utilizes Roadside Equipments to shoulder off computation and communication tasks from Onboard Equipments. A simulation study measures VANET efficiency protected by the new strategy compared to traditional schemes such as channel surfing. The study validates the VANET security metrics and the metrics-directed approach of design for security schemes.