Jamming Strategies in DYMO MANETs: Assessing Detectability and Operational Impacts

The wide deployment of smart phones has begun to make them pragmatic deployment environments for real-world at-scale MANETs (i.e., to provide peer-to-peer based non-cellular services). Such services, of course, will be subject to cyber-attacks, one of the simplest of which is radio frequency (RF) jamming. The success of these MANETs will require both: i) robust and accurate methods of detecting when jammers are present and ii) methods of mitigating jammer impacts. This work explores the effects that various jamming strategies have on MANET operations as observed via standard MANET operational measures such as: packet delivery ratio, delay, routing overhead, and hops travelled. It is shown that the detect ability of active jammers heavily depends both on which measure is used and the exact nature of the jamming strategy employed. Moreover, although basic approaches such as constant jamming are easily detectable, it is shown that little work is required to construct far less detectable jamming strategies.