The impact of jamming on threshold-based agreement in VANET

In Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) enables communication among vehicles (V2V) and vehicles to infrastructure (V2I). ITS safety applications are designed to increase road safety and to reduce accidents. The reliability of DSRC-based ITS safety applications is essential. Thus, improving resiliency against faults, and enhancing reliability, are primary goals. Research has shown that threshold-based agreement methods effectively reduce the impact of value faults through validating events, by receiving the Basic Safety Message (BSM) from multiple sources. Whereas previous work considered value faults, e.g., injection, data fabrication and sensor manipulation, it does not address the impact of omission faults and jamming. This paper investigates the impact of jamming on threshold-based agreement in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET). It is shown that jamming drastically reduces the correctness of the voted upon decision. We consider the Emergency Electronic Brake Lights (EEBL) safety application, and demonstrate how jammer position and power affect the correctness of the decision. Furthermore we show how the number of vehicles impacts the correctness of decisions in the presence of jamming. Finally a new adaptive threshold algorithm is introduced that improves the resilience against jamming attacks compared to algorithms presented in previous research.