Analysis and Performance of Topology Inference in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper examines the performance of a strategy for mapping the topology of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), providing insight for network defenders to understand how much information an adversary could discern about a target network. Using this topology inference strategy, a network eavesdropper collects frame emission start- and end-times and uses these to detect the presence of link layer acknowledgements between devices and ultimately constructs a network topology. We show how the performance of this simple strategy varies as a function of the amount of data collected by the eavesdropper over time, the size of the target network, the speed of the nodes, and the nodes’ data generation rate. We derive analytical results that allow for the rapid computation of expected true positive rate and false positive rate for topology inference in a MANET; these are compared against simulation results. The analytical results are used to derive a sensible window of observation over which to perform inference, with guidance on when to discard stale data. The results are also used to recommend strategies for network defenders to frustrate the performance of an adversary’s network inference.