A game-theoretic analysis of denial of service attacks in wireless random access

In wireless access, transmitter nodes need to make individual decisions for distributed operation and do not necessarily cooperate with each other. We consider a single-receiver random access system of non-cooperative transmitters with the individual objectives of optimizing their throughput rewards, transmission energy costs and delay costs. The non-cooperative transmitter behavior may be purely selfish or may also reflect malicious objectives of generating interference to prevent the successful transmissions of the other nodes as a form of denial of service attack. Our goal is to evaluate the interactions between selfish and malicious nodes that have the dual objectives of optimizing their individual performance measures and blocking the packet transmissions of the other selfish nodes. We assume saturated packet queues of infinite buffer capacities and consider a general multi-packet reception channel that allows packet captures in the presence of simultaneous transmissions. In this context, we formulate a non-cooperative random access game of selecting the individual probabilities of transmitting packets to a common receiver. We derive the non-cooperative transmission strategies in Nash equilibrium. The analysis provides insights for the optimal strategies to block random access of selfish nodes as well as the optimal defense mechanisms against the possible denial of service attacks of malicious nodes in wireless networks. The results are also compared with the cooperative equilibrium strategies that optimize the total system utility (separately under random access and scheduled access). A pricing scheme is presented to improve the non-cooperative operation. For distributed implementation, we formulate a repeated game of the best-response strategy updates and introduce adaptive heuristics (based on the channel feedback only) provided that the system parameters are not explicitly known at the individual transmitters.

Anthony EphremidesEmail:

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Yalin Evren Sagduyu   received his B.S. degree from Bogazici University, Turkey, in 2000 in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland at College Park in 2002 and 2007, respectively, in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has been a graduate research assistant with the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University. His research interests are in the areas of design and optimization of wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, game theory applications in communication systems, multi-user information theory and network coding. Anthony Ephremides   received his B.S. degree from the National Technical University of Athens (1967), and M.S. (1969) and Ph.D. (1971) degrees from Princeton University, all in Electrical Engineering. He has been at the University of Maryland since 1971, and currently holds a joint appointment as professor in the Electrical Engineering Department and the Institute of Systems Research (ISR). He is co-founder of the NASA Center for Commercial Development of Space on Hybrid and Satellite Communications Networks established in 1991 at Maryland as an offshoot of the ISR. He was a visiting professor in 1978 at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and in 1979 at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of California at Berkeley and INRIA, France. During 1985–1986 he was on leave at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. He has been President of the Information Theory Society of the IEEE (1987), and served on the Board of the IEEE (1989 and 1990). His interests are in the areas of communication theory, communication systems and networks, queuing systems, signal processing, and satellite communications.