Modelling Critical Node Attacks in MANETs

MANETs (mobile ad hoc networks) operate in a self-organised and decentralised way. Attacks against nodes that are highly relied to relay traffic could result in a wide range of service outage. A comprehensive model that could enhance the understanding of network behaviour under attacks is important to the design and construction of resilient self-organising networks. Previously, we modelled MANETs as an aggregation of time-varying graphs into a static weighted graph, in which the weights represent link availability of pairwise nodes. Centrality metrics were used to measure node significance but might not always be optimal. In this paper, we define a new metric called criticality that can capture node significance more accurately than centrality metrics. We demonstrate that attacks based on criticality have greater impact on network performance than centrality-based attacks in real-time MANETs.