Detection and prevention against RTS attacks in wireless LANs

Abstract

Widely deployed wireless network devices use a shared medium to communicate among mobile nodes. Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) standard (IEEE 802.11) is set of MAC and PHY layer specifications and uses Virtual Carrier Sense mechanism to control medium access in such a way that devices can communicate without interfering each other. However, there exist vulnerabilities that can lead to Denial of Service (DOS) for the devices in range of a node with malicious intent. This paper discusses RTS (Request to Send) attack where malicious nodes reserve the medium unnecessarily for overdue period of time. The effects of such attacks on performance of WLAN are observed, proposed a mitigation technique to restore network performance and analyzed the improvement in performance.