An Experimental Study of the Performance Impact of Path-Based DoS Attacks in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are considered as cost effective, easily deployable and capable of extending Internet connectivity. However, one of the major challenges in deploying reliable WMNs is preventing their nodes from malicious attacks, which is of particular concern as attacks can severely degrade network performance. When a DoS attack is targeted over an entire communication path, it is called a path-based DoS attack. We study the performance impact of path-based DoS attacks by considering attack intensity, medium errors, physical diversity, collusion and hop count. We setup a wireless mesh testbed and configure a set of experiments to gather realistic measurements, and assess the effects of different factors. We find that medium errors have significant impact on the performance of WMNs when a path-based DoS attack is carried out, and the impact is exacerbated by the MAC layer retransmissions. We show that due to physical diversity, a far attacker can lead to an increased performance degradation than a close-by attacker. Additionally, we demonstrate that the joint impact of two colluding attackers is not as severe as the joint result of individual attacks. We also discuss a strategy to counter path-based DoS attacks which can potentially alleviate the impact of the attack significantly.