Mitigating Network Congestion from Flooding Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks using Signal Strength Adjustment

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are more prone to network attacks due to the limit of resources of their nodes. This paper dives into a mitigation strategy against flooding attacks, a potent attack that causes critical network congestion. The mechanism enables the authorized sensor nodes to decrease their transmission power when they experience high packet loss rates. The network establishes smaller communication cells, that link to the network’s ability re-route the data traffic around the congested area created by the attacker. It was done using the Cooja simulator for Contiki OS in order to test the purpose. The results are evaluated based on three criterias which are “Packet-Delivery Ratio (PDR)”, “the network throughput” and “packet type distribution”. These research results show that flooding attack destroyed 95% of the authorized packet delivery which initially began at 100% and reached around 5%, as 90% of network data was occupied by the attacker. The active mitigation strategy, restored the packet delivery to 65% while the attack traffic decreased to 30% of all packets in totals, showing that signal strength adjustment works as an effective defense mechanism.