SPREAD: Foiling Smart Jammers Using Multi-Layer Agility

In this paper, we address the problem of cross-layer denial of service attack in wireless data networks. We introduce SPREAD -a novel adaptive diversification approach to provide resiliency against such attacks. SPREAD relies on a mechanism-hopping technique, which can be seen as a multi-layer extension of the frequency-hopping technique. We apply a game-theoretic framework for modeling the interaction of the communicating nodes and the adversaries and analyze the proposed approach. We reason about the advantages of SPREAD against various types of jammers and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in the case of IEEE 802.11 protocol stack by studying the EIFS attack, periodical jamming and a Packet-Size Game. As an example, we show that mechanism-hopping over two instances of IEEE 802.11 can achieve several orders of magnitude gain in throughput over a single-instance network under the EIFS attack.