MeshJam: Intelligent Jamming Attack and Defense in IEEE 802.11s Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks represent an emerging network architecture which has been actively studied and standardized for the last several years. Because of their flexible network architecture, wireless mesh networks can provide alternative paths even when wireless links are broken by node failures or routing attacks. Among a variety of mesh network protocols, we focus on the recently ratified IEEE 802.11s WLAN mesh standard. With analysis of the path selection scheme in 802.11s, we show the effect of conventional jamming on 802.11s-based wireless mesh networks via simulation. We then introduce mesh jamming, which can more efficiently attack the mesh path selection process by exploiting cross-layer knowledge and more harmfully influence on the path discovery performance compared to conventional jamming. We propose a proof-of-concept defense, bi-directional path discovery to mitigate the devastating effect of mesh jamming.