Denial-of-service resistant quality-of-service signaling for mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

A class of Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on quality-of-service (QoS) based signaling protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can severely cripple network performance with relatively little effort expended by the attacker. We propose a new distributed QoS signaling scheme that is resilient to this class of attacks. The key elements of the scheme are: sensing of available bandwidth, traffic policing, and rate monitoring. The proposed scheme provides QoS differentiation for best effort and real-time traffic, and achieves a compromise between signaling protocols that require the maintenance of per-flow state and those that are completely stateless. We demonstrate how the scheme can defend against DoS attacks and show that it scales gracefully in terms of the number of nodes and/or trafic flows in the MANET.