Embedding Jamming Attacks into Physical Layer Models in Optical Networks

Abstract: Optical networks are prone to physical layer attacks, in particular the insertion of high jamming power. In this paper, we present a study of jamming attacks in elastic optical networks (EON) by embedding the jamming into the physical layer model, and we analyze its impact on the blocking probability and slots utilization. We evaluate our proposed model using a single link and a network topology and we show that for in-band-jamming, the slots utilization decreases with the increase of jamming power, and becomes null when the jamming power is higher than 3 dB, while for out-of-band jamming, the impact is maximal for a specific jamming power, 1.75 dB in our simulation. Considering multiple positions of attackers, we attained the highest blocking probability 32% for a specific jamming power 2 dB. We conclude that the impact of jamming depends on attacker positions as well as the jamming power.