Evaluating the Impact of DDoS Attacks in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

The presence of either malicious vehicles or inaccessibility of network services makes vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) easy targets for denial of service (DoS) attacks. The sole purpose of DoS attacks is to prevent the intended users from accessing the available resources and services. When the DoS attack is carried out by multiple vehicles distributed throughout the network, it is referred as distributed DoS (DDoS) attack. A lot of works have been done by researchers in securing the vehicular communication against the DDoS attacks. In this paper, efforts have been made to simulate the DDoS attacks in VANETs as well as to study their impact on the performance of networks. The experimental results are presented using six important metrics, which are collision, jitter, delay, packet drop, ratio-in-out, and throughput. The experimental results show that the impact of distributed DoS (DDoS) attack on networks performance is very critical and must be addressed to ensure the smooth functioning of networks.