A Unified Resource Allocation Framework for Defending Against Pollution Attacks in Wireless Network Coding Systems

Pollution attacks can cause severe damages in network coding systems. Many approaches have been proposed to defend against pollution attacks. However, the current approaches implicitly assume that the defender has adequate resources to defend against pollution attacks. When the resources of the defender are limited, they provide no information for the defender to allocate the resources to get better defense performance. In this paper, we consider the case that the defender's resources are limited and study how the defender allocates resources to defend against pollution attacks. We first study this problem in one-session transmissions, and we propose a two-player strategic game to model the interactions between the defender and the attacker. Under this model, two algorithms are proposed to find the best response strategy for the defender. Then, we study the resource allocation problem in a multi-session setting. We propose an extensive game model and an enhancement algorithm to solve the resource allocation problem under this circumstance. Finally, we conducted extensive simulations to evaluate the proposed algorithms. The results demonstrate that our algorithms can significantly improve the utility of the defender, with reasonable computation time.