A measurement driven, 802.11 anti-jamming system

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of jamming on 802.11 networks and introduces ARES, a system that dynamically tunes rate adaptation and power control to mitigate jamming effects, significantly improving throughput.

Contribution

The paper presents ARES, a novel reinforcement system that optimizes physical layer parameters to counteract jamming in various 802.11 network configurations.

Findings

Rate adaptation algorithms can worsen performance under jamming.

Tuning carrier sensing thresholds enables communication despite jamming.

ARES improves throughput by up to 150% across multiple testbeds.

Abstract

Dense, unmanaged 802.11 deployments tempt saboteurs into launching jamming attacks by injecting malicious interference. Nowadays, jammers can be portable devices that transmit intermittently at low power in order to conserve energy. In this paper, we first conduct extensive experiments on an indoor 802.11 network to assess the ability of two physical layer functions, rate adaptation and power control, in mitigating jamming. In the presence of a jammer we find that: (a) the use of popular rate adaptation algorithms can significantly degrade network performance and, (b) appropriate tuning of the carrier sensing threshold allows a transmitter to send packets even when being jammed and enables a receiver capture the desired signal. Based on our findings, we build ARES, an Anti-jamming REinforcement System, which tunes the parameters of rate adaptation and power control to improve the performance in the presence of jammers. ARES ensures that operations under benign conditions are unaffected. To demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of ARES, we evaluate it in three wireless testbeds: (a) an 802.11n WLAN with MIMO nodes, (b) an 802.11a/g mesh network with mobile jammers and (c) an 802.11a WLAN. We observe that ARES improves the network throughput across all testbeds by up to 150%.