Project Proposal
By Zach Anderson and Henry Lin

For our project, we are interested in developing adversarial wireless links and nodes
for ns-2. Simulations of ad-hoc routing algorithms with adversarial nodes tailored for
that purpose have often been used in the presentation of those algorithms, but missing
from ns-2 is a general framework for developing adversarial behavior. To our knowledge
the only facilities that currently exist in ns-2 are the ability to adjust link delay
and transmission power of wireless nodes. Furthermore the wireless loss model is based
solely on transmission power.

We would like to build on the existing wireless physical model to attempt to inject
bit-level errors with a frequency dependent on the characteristics of the topology.
Also useful for sensor net simulations would be a motion model or a model for
correlated failure. Furthermore, we would like to build an adversarial link structure
to, among other things, inject duplicate packets, vary connectivity, and drop packets
based on a two state Markov model. Also, we would like to develop a general
adversarial wireless node that could be easily customized by the protocol developer.
These nodes could be modified to alter data fields, send spurious traffic, or send
application or routing specific packets depending on user provided functions written
in their tcl scripts. Parameters dictating the power of the adversary could be
increased until progress is no longer made for some definition of progress.

Our work could be evaluated by attempting to find arrangements of these behaviors that
cause some of the simulated applications supplied with ns-2 to perform more poorly
than expected. Also, we could attempt to find cases in which the wireless MAC protocol
also performs poorly.

In order to develop better adversarial models we will conduct a literature survey of
recent research on wireless ad-hoc routing algorithms and other wireless protocols.
Furthermore, if time permits we will attempt to develop some theoretical understanding
of how different protocols interact with the adversary.