On Assessing the Impact of Jamming Strategies on the Behavior of DYMO-Based MANETs

The wide-scale deployment of smart phones has begun to provide a pragmatic deployment environment for at-scale MANETs, (i.e., for providing non-cellular based mobile device services). The services enabled via these MANETs will, of course, be subject to cyber-attacks, some of the simplest of which are wireless jamming attacks. Through simulation studies, this work assesses the impact that such jamming attacks have on standard network-level MANET features, (i.e., packet delivery ratio (PDR), hops traveled, delay, etc.), using DYMO as the exemplar MANET routing protocol. More particularly, it is shown that jamming causes more complex effects to the MANET´s behavior than generally has been reported. For example jamming can cause: a) it to take considerably longer for start-up transients to decay, and b) a larger percentage of the experiments in which statistical steady-states are never reached, (i.e., the start-up transients are never observed to decay). These results are important as they highlight that jamming can have significant impact´s on MANET operations past just causing network disconnections. These issues, in turn, imply that designing jamming resistant or resilient MANETs may be significantly more challenging than prior work would tend to suggest.