Real Time Detection of MAC Layer DoS Attacks in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

In this paper, a real time detection of Medium Access Control (MAC) layer attacks in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks is proposed. There can be different kinds of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks observed at the MAC layer such as misbehaviour and selfish attacks. The malicious nodes manipulate the MAC protocol parameters such as back-off time, network allocation vector value and short inter frame space, or flood the network with huge volume of dummy packets. With this, the attacker nodes capture entire network bandwidth causing legitimate nodes not communicate with other nodes, consequently decreasing the throughput of the nodes significantly. This paper gives an effective real time detection of these attacks with minimal detection delay. We collect the delay and throughput data and apply a change point detection algorithm to observe the change of distribution. To observe the effect of these attacks, two types of attacks: back-off manipulation and RTS flooding are simulated using Network Simulator (NS-3). The simulation results shows the efficiency of the detection algorithm in terms of delay and throughput results.