Behavior Analysis of Flooding Attacks in Sparse Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

In recent years, many store-carry-forward routing schemes have been proposed for sparse mobile ad-hoc networks, which are the most representative networks in delay/disconnected tolerant network environments. In general, store-carry-forward routing schemes are designed under the assumption that all nodes in the network are good and cooperative. Therefore, they are highly vulnerable to malicious attacks. To eliminate these vulnerabilities, we need to clarify the characteristics of such malicious attacks. In this paper, we focus on analyzing the behavior of flooding attacks in which malicious nodes generate unnecessary messages to exhaust network resources. Through simulation experiments, we reveal how flooding attacks affect the system performance.