Secure Channel Reservation for Wireless Networks

In reservation-based MAC protocols, adversaries that have compromised a node can perform an efficient denial-ofservice attack by sending excessive reservation requests. Attackers, having thus prevented legitimate users from using some fraction of the bandwidth, can then use their power for jamming the legitimate transmissions instead of transmitting on the reserved channel. We propose a countermeasure which forces attackers to choose between the two attacks and restricts the optimal attacker behavior to physical-layer jamming, which in general is a weaker attack than over-reservation, when attackers are the minority of the network. Our work consists of a bandwidth allocation scheme that maximizes spectral efficiency and thus provides optimal performance and a channel coordination mechanism where users exchange and reach a consensus channel reservation in both centralized and distributed settings. By theoretical analysis and simulations, we demonstrate a substantial performance gain over the case where no countermeasure is utilized.