Polling and Dual-Level Traffic Analysis for Improved Dos Detection in IEEE 802.21 Networks

The IEEE 802.21 standard was developed for communication of devices in a heterogeneous environment which included greater support for handoffs. This paper focuses on the denial of service (DoS) vulnerabilities faced by such Media Independent Handover (MIH) networks&various effective countermeasures that can be deployed to prevent their impact on such heterogeneous networks. The use of polling mechanism coupled with real time as well as offline traffic analysis can keep a good number of attacks at bay. The use of offline traffic analysis is to use the model and compare it with a lighter model and see if any of the excluded features in the lighter model have had suspicious variations which could be a varied form of DoS attack or an attack that is completely new. The countermeasures that have been developed also allows for the increase in efficiency of data transfer as well as higher rates of success in handoffs.