Providing survivability against jamming attack for multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks

Built upon a shared wireless medium, wireless mesh network is particularly vulnerable to jamming attacks. The ability to recover from attacks and maintain an acceptable level of service degradation is a crucial aspect in the design of a wireless mesh network. To address this issue, this paper investigates the network restoration solutions via the joint design of traffic rerouting, channel re-assignment, and scheduling over a multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh network. Efficient routing and channel assignment schemes can relieve the interference caused by both the normal network nodes and the jamming nodes. Therefore, based on the necessary conditions of schedulability, we first formulate the optimal network restoration problem as linear programming problem, which gives an upper bound on the achievable network throughput. After we solve the LP problems, we have a set of flows assigned to edges that have been assigned to different channels. And based on the LP solutions, we provide a greedy scheduling algorithm using dynamic channel assignment, which schedules both the network traffic and the jamming traffic. And we further provide a greedy static edge channel assignment algorithm, where a channel is assigned to an edge at the beginning and will remain fixed over all time slots. In particular, we consider two strategies, namely global restoration and local restoration, which can support a range of tradeoffs between the restoration latency and network throughput after restoration. To quantitatively evaluate the impact of jamming attacks during and after restoration, we define two performance degradation indices, transient disruption index (TDI) and throughput degradation index (THI). Finally, extensive performance evaluations are performed to study the impact of various jamming scenarios in an example wireless mesh network. & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.