Investigating the Effect of Jamming Attacks on Wireless LANS

Abstract

WLANs (Wireless local area networks) are the most widely used networks in homes as well as in commercial areas. WLANs suffer from various security threats. One of the most important attacks in denial of service (DOS) attacks are jamming attacks. As the communication in wireless networks are based on radio channels, jamming attacks interfere with the transmission channels by sending semi-valid packets (useless) in order to disturb the communication between actual nodes. The main objective of this paper is to explain frequency sweep jammer working and how it affects the performance of a network using OPNET simulation tool. For this purpose wireless networks are simulated by flooding the network with frequency sweep jammer and to determine whether switching channels can avoid jamming attack. In the simulations, initially network is configured to communicate in channel 1 and comparisons were made for network throughput and delay with and without jammer, which has demonstrated that jamming effects the performance. To avoid jamming attack communication channel is changed to 6 and the results of switching channels are explained. General Terms Throughput, Delay, Performance.