On the Performance Analysis of IDLP and SpaceMac for Network Coding-Enabled Mobile Small Cells

Network coding (NC)-enabled mobile small cells are observed as a promising technology for 5G networks in a cost-effective and energy-efficient manner. The NC-enabled environment suffers from pollution attacks where malicious intermediate nodes manipulate packets in transition. Detecting the polluted packets as well as identifying the exact location of malicious users are equally important tasks for these networks. SpaceMac (Le & Markopoulou, 2012) is one of the most competitive mechanisms in the literature for detecting pollution attacks and identifying the exact location of attackers in RLNC. In this letter, we compare SpaceMac with the IDLP mechanism presented by Parsamehr et al. (2020). Both mechanisms have been implemented in KODO and they are compared in terms of computational complexity, computational overhead, communication overhead and decoding probability. The performance evaluation results demonstrated that IDLP is more efficient than SpaceMac while at the same time is more secure as shown through the security analysis part in this letter.

Automated summary

Network coding-enabled mobile small cells are seen as a cost-effective and energy-efficient technology for 5G networks, but face pollution attacks. SpaceMac and IDLP are competitive mechanisms for detecting pollution attacks, with IDLP showing better efficiency and security in comparison.