Performance Evaluation of Various Countermeasures for Grayhole Attack in Wireless Mesh Network

Abstract: Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been advancing as a solution for large scale high speed internet access through their self configuring, low cost and scalability. But as compared to wired networks, WMNs are likely to suffer from different security attacks due to its open medium nature, dynamic topology and distributed architecture. A special case of Denial of service (DoS) is called selective forwarding attack or Grayhole attack. This paper compares various counter measures for Grayhole attack in WMNs. The counter measures include Watchdog, Byzantine-Resilient Secure Multicast Routing (BSMR) and channel aware detection (CAD). From the comparison study, it can be concluded that CAD have high packet delivery ratio than Watchdog and BSMR.

Keywords: Wireless mesh networks, Selective forwarding attacks, Watchdog, BSMR, Channel-aware detection