Detection and Minimization of Jamming Attacks to Enhance String Stability in VANETs

Abstract

Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs) is an emerging area and has achieved popularity in the last decade. Due to its increased use, attacks on such networks have also increased. In this paper, we have evaluated an approach for Jamming attack’s detection and also to minimize such attacks for the string stability of vehicles. String stability is essential for the safety of the vehicles because if the string stability is disturbed then there are chances of rear-end collisions among the vehicles. String Stability among the vehicles is maintained by the periodic broadcasting of beacon messages which contains information about vehicles acceleration, direction, velocity, speed etc. Jamming disturbs the transmission of beacons from the transmitter to the receiver and hence string stability is also disturbed. The jamming attack is detected by the calculation of time delay Δt of the beacon message from the source to the receiver along with the beacon’s Bit-Error-Rate (BER). Upon detection of the jamming, the mitigation algorithm is called which is a mixture of interpolation and plausibility check. Interpolation is done if the BER is decreasing with time which means that nodes are coming out from the range of adversary or jamming area. But if BER is increasing with time it means that nodes are moving towards the jamming area or adversary, then a plausibility check is done to check whether switching the frequency of communication is safe or not. And after that channel is switched and the effects of jamming are mitigated. Satisfying results in terms of maintaining the string stability among the nodes are achieved.