An Attack Injection Approach to Evaluate the Robustness of Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc networks constitute a quick and cheap alternative to provide communications when deploying a fixed infrastructure could result prohibitive in terms of either time or money. Although the unique properties of ad hoc networks make them very sensitive to malicious faults (attacks), most of current research has focused on improving their routing capabilities, thus widening their application domains, and very little attention has been devoted to their dependability. Accordingly, the confident use of this technology requires the development of new techniques and tools to assess the robustness of such networks in presence of attacks. This paper deals with this challenging goal by proposing an attack injection approach based on real ad hoc networks as experimental platform. Experiments show the feasibility of the proposed approach and identify a large number of possibilities to increase our knowledge on how real ad hoc networks behave in practice.