Jamming DoS in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

In this paper, we consider an intelligent malicious mobile that can send signals which would cause interference to the users that communicate with an Access Point (AP). The attack is based on the well known anomaly of IEEE 802.11 in which a single connection with low signal to noise ratio causes the throughputs of all connections to decrease. The attacker tries to exploit this anomaly by jamming a single node in the cell. The rate of that particular node reduces and thus the throughput of all the hosts transmitting at higher rate is degraded below the level of the lower rate. The jammer tries to maximize the throughput degradation by driving the SINR below the SINR threshold reception and placing itself at its optimal position. We analyze the impact of jamming on the system throughput especially from the perspective of jammers utility. Extensive simulations are conducted to analyze the performance of the jammer on 802.11 WLANs.