Analysis of Jamming Effects on IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

IEEE 802.11 wireless transmissions suffer from a big security flaw as they are vulnerable to Denial of Service Attacks (DoS) which can degrade enormously their performance, especially their achieved throughput. One of the most harmful forms of these attacks is the jamming. In this paper, we provide an analytical model to study the effect of jamming on WLANs. Hence, we implement a physical layer jamming to show the effect at the MAC layer level (i.e. cross-layer jamming). Different jamming scenarios, with different modulation techniques such as DSSS and OFDM, were distinguished in order to evaluate the most accurately possible the effect of jamming on WLANs performance. Extensive simulations, under ns-3 tool, are conducted to validate the correctness of the theoretical analysis. We show that low rates (e.g. 1Mbps) are more resistant to jamming than high rates (e.g. 27Mbps). Also, we show that energy consumption when jamming depends only on communication time. Valuable observations are provided to derive solutions for jamming.