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A game-theoretic analysis of denial of service attacks in wireless random access

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Abstract

In wireless access, transmitter nodes need to make individual decisions for distributed operation and do not necessarily cooperate with each other. We consider a single-receiver random access system of non-cooperative transmitters with the individual objectives of optimizing their throughput rewards, transmission energy costs and delay costs. The non-cooperative transmitter behavior may be purely selfish or may also reflect malicious objectives of generating interference to prevent the successful transmissions of the other nodes as a form of denial of service attack. Our goal is to evaluate the interactions between selfish and malicious nodes that have the dual objectives of optimizing their individual performance measures and blocking the packet transmissions of the other selfish nodes. We assume saturated packet queues of infinite buffer capacities and consider a general multi-packet reception channel that allows packet captures in the presence of simultaneous transmissions. In this context, we formulate a non-cooperative random access game of selecting the individual probabilities of transmitting packets to a common receiver. We derive the non-cooperative transmission strategies in Nash equilibrium. The analysis provides insights for the optimal strategies to block random access of selfish nodes as well as the optimal defense mechanisms against the possible denial of service attacks of malicious nodes in wireless networks. The results are also compared with the cooperative equilibrium strategies that optimize the total system utility (separately under random access and scheduled access). A pricing scheme is presented to improve the non-cooperative operation. For distributed implementation, we formulate a repeated game of the best-response strategy updates and introduce adaptive heuristics (based on the channel feedback only) provided that the system parameters are not explicitly known at the individual transmitters.

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Notes

  1. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Laboratory or the US Government.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported in part by the Office of Naval Research under grant 528773 and by the Department of Defense under MURI grant 433859. Prepared through collaborative participation in the Communications and Networks Consortium sponsored by the US Army Research Laboratory under the Collaborative Technology Alliance Program, Cooperative Agreement DAAD19-01-2-0011. The US Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon. The material in this paper was presented in part at WiOpt’07, 5th Intl. Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks, Apr. 2007, Limassol, Cyprus.

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  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, 2145 Sheridan Road, Tech L359, Evanston, IL, 60208, USA

    Yalin Evren Sagduyu

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Anthony Ephremides

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  1. Yalin Evren Sagduyu
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  2. Anthony Ephremides
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Correspondence to Yalin Evren Sagduyu.

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Sagduyu, Y.E., Ephremides, A. A game-theoretic analysis of denial of service attacks in wireless random access. Wireless Netw 15, 651–666 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-007-0088-8

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