Integrated detection and mitigation of pollution attack in wireless network coding: Physical layer approach

We take a physical-layer approach in detecting the falsely injected packet (pollution attack) and removing it from the polluted packet to restore the true coded packet in wireless network coding system. The proposed scheme builds on the maximum likelihood detection principle which is optimal in the sense of minimizing the probability of detection error. It “recycles” the polluted packet by discarding only the faulty information and using the remaining part in recovering the message. This makes it unnecessary to retransmit new coded packets and allows uninterrupted communication even under the heavy attack. The proposed scheme can provide a significant improvement in the throughput and reliability over the cryptographic solutions without requiring any transmission overhead.