Title: The performance of a watchdog protocol for wireless network security

Authors: Jin Wook Lee, Yann-Hang Lee, Violet R. Syrotiuk

Addresses: Communication and Networking Lab., Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, P.O. Box 111, Suwon 440-600, Korea. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-8809, USA. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-8809, USA

Abstract: In wireless networks, a watchdog mechanism can be a part of the security architecture used to identify nodes that fail to forward the packets they agree to forward. In this paper, we propose two protocols to address the ambiguous collision limitation of watchdogs. The Watchdog Alert (WA) and Watchdog Confirmation (WC) protocols are variants of the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance Protocol (CSMA/CA). We analyse the trade-offs between throughput and watchdog success probability of each protocol, comparing it to CSMA/CA.

Keywords: wireless networks; network security; watchdog protocol; monitoring protocols; intrusion detection; mobile networks; collision limitation; carrier sense multiple access; collision avoidance; CSMA/CA protocol.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2007.013793

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2007 Vol.2 No.1, pp.28 - 36

Published online: 28 May 2007 *

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