Design and Analysis of an Attack Resilient and Adaptive Medium access Control Protocol for Computer Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes an adaptive MAC protocol that improves bandwidth utilization and resilience against various attacks by modifying CSMA/CD to detect unutilized periods and respond accordingly, enhancing performance under load and attack conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a modified CSMA/CD protocol that adapts to network state and mitigates attack effects, improving efficiency and fairness in wireless networks.

Findings

Enhanced bandwidth utilization through adaptive mechanisms.

Effective detection and mitigation of denial of service and jamming attacks.

Improved fairness and performance stability under attack conditions.

Abstract

The challenge of designing an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol and analyzing it has been an important research topic for over 30 years. This paper focuses on the performance analysis (through simulation) and modification of a well known MAC protocol CSMA/CD. The existing protocol does not consider the wastage of bandwidth due to unutilized periods of the channel. By considering this fact, performance of MAC protocol can be enhanced. The purpose of this work is to modify the existing protocol by enabling it to adapt according to state of the network. The modified protocol takes appropriate action whenever unutilized periods detected. In this way, to increase the effective bandwidth utilization and determine how it behaves under increasing load, and varying packet sizes. It will also include effects of attacks i.e. Denial of service attacks, Replay Attack, Continuous Channel Access or Exhaustion attack, Flooding attack, Jamming (Radio interference) attack, Selective forwarding attack which degrade performance of MAC protocol. In Continuous Channel Access or Exhaustion attack, a malicious node disrupts the MAC protocol, by continuously requesting or transmitting over the channel. This eventually leads a starvation for other nodes in the network w.r.t channel access. remedy may be the network ignores excessive requests without sending expensive radio transmissions. This limit however cannot drop below the expected maximum data rate the network has to support. This limit is usually coded into the protocol during the design phase and requires additional logic also. Repeated application of these exhaustion or collision based MAC layer attacks can lead into unfairness.