IDLP Mechanism for NC-enabled Mobile Small Cells based on Broadcast Nature of Wireless Communication

Network Coding (NC) technology can be foreseen as a promising solution for mobile small cell technology problems existing in the 5th generation of mobile networks. NC-enabled mobile small cells increase network throughput and improve their performance in a cost-effective and energy-efficient manner. However, NC-enabled mobile small cells are vulnerable to pollution attacks. Although there have been some works done on pollution attack detection, the attackers may continue to pollute packets in the next transmission of coded packets from the source to the destinations. Therefore, in this paper, we present an intrusion detection and location-aware prevention mechanism to not only detect the pollution attacks and drop them but also detect the attacker’s exact location in order to block them from making pollution in the next transmissions. In the proposed mechanism, the detection scheme is based on a homomorphic MAC scheme, and we make use of the advantages within broadcast nature in the wireless communication medium to find the source of the pollution attacks. The proposed mechanism, SpaceMac proposed in [1] and the IDLP mechanism proposed in [2] have been implemented in Kodo and their performance has been evaluated in terms of decoding probability.