# Mitigating Traffic Remapping Attacks in Autonomous Multi-hop Wireless Networks

## TL;DR

This paper proposes a game-theoretic, distributed mitigation strategy called DISTRESS to counter traffic remapping attacks in autonomous multi-hop wireless networks, promoting honest behavior and maintaining QoS.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel QoS metric and a self-enforcing game-theoretic approach with a signaling mechanism to encourage honest node behavior in the presence of TRAs.

## Key findings

- DISTRESS encourages honest behavior after limited play time
- The approach maintains acceptable QoS for most nodes
- Simulations confirm effectiveness in static and mobile scenarios

## Abstract

Multi-hop wireless networks with autonomous nodes are susceptible to selfish traffic remapping attacks (TRAs). Nodes launching TRAs leverage the underlying channel access function to receive unduly high quality of service (QoS) for packet flows traversing source-to-destination routes. TRAs are easy to execute, impossible to prevent, difficult to detect, and harmful to the QoS of honest nodes. Recognizing the need for providing QoS security, we use a novel network-oriented QoS metric to propose a self-enforcing game-theoretic mitigation approach. By switching between TRA and honest behavior, selfish nodes engage in a noncooperative multistage game in pursuit of high QoS. We analyze feasible node strategies and design a distributed signaling mechanism called DISTRESS, under which, given certain conditions, the game produces a desirable outcome: after an upper-bounded play time, honesty tends to become a selfish node's best-reply behavior, while yielding acceptable QoS to most or all nodes. We verify these findings by Monte Carlo and ns-3 simulations of static and mobile nodes.