Defending Against DDOS Attacks on IoT Network Throughput: A Trust-Stackelberg Game Model

IoTs generally rely on resource-constrained devices to sense, relay, and collect data, which are highly vulnerable to Distributed-Denial-of-Services (DDOS) attacks on network throughput. In this paper, we propose a trust-based method to optimize the network throughput of IoTs under DDOS attacks. Specifically, with the assistance of a small number of dedicatedly deployed defense nodes as defenders, a network controller can first measure the behavior of other IoT nodes and categorize them into three types (i.e., innocent, selfish, and attack) through a well-designed trust evaluation model. Then, a Stackelberg game model is constructed accordingly, where defenders are leaders and other nodes are followers. We carefully define the utilities of the leaders and the followers in the game, and transform the optimization problem of the network throughput into the maximization problem of the defenders' utilities considering the utilities of the followers. We adopt the Dinkelbach Programming (DP)-based algorithm to solve the maximization problem such that a Stackelberg equilibrium can be reached with optimized network throughput. Extensive simulations are performed to demonstrate that the proposed defense method can significantly increase the IoT network throughput under different DDOS attack intensities.