Detecting bottlenecks on-the-fly in OLSR based MANETs

Attackers are usually interested in the important assets of the attack´s target. In networks, bottleneck nodes - those that sit on many potential routes between sender and receiver - are the highest value asset that can be compromised. The dynamic nature of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) causes ubiquitous routing algorithms to be even more susceptible to this class of attacks. Besides actually finding such bottleneck locations, an attacker can subvert the routing to create a virtual bottleneck. In this paper we propose a method of detecting bottleneck nodes in MANETs based on the prevalent OLSR protocol without imposing additional network traffic. Once such a bottleneck has been discovered, we propose mitigation methods.