Impact of paging channel overloads or attacks on a cellular network

  • Authors:
  • Jérémy Serror;Hui Zang;Jean C. Bolot

  • Affiliations:
  • Ecole Normale Supérieure;Sprint Advanced Tech. Labs;Sprint Advanced Tech. Labs

  • Venue:
  • WiSe '06 Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on Wireless security
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

IP and cellular phone networks used to be isolated from each other. In recent years however, the two networks have started to overlap with the emergence of devices that access the Internet using cellular infrastructures. One important question then, given this overlap, is whether actions or threats on the Internet side can impact the telecom or cellular side. We address this problem in the paper and specifically consider threats on the paging channel, which is a key conduit shared by both Internet and cellular traffic.Our contributions are as follows: we illustrate through experiments on a CDMA2000 cellular network that overloads or attacks launched from the Internet can significantly increase the paging load and increase the delay of paging messages, including cellular call setup requests, which in turn could lead to non-completed calls; we derive a simple but accurate queuing model for the paging system in a CDMA2000 network and use this model to demonstrate that the paging channel exhibits sharp rather than graceful degradation under load; and through this model, we identify critical parameters that impact paging performance. Although our study is focused on CDMA2000 networks, we believe that similar problems exist in other types of cellular networks that employ a single control channel with limited bandwidth for both voice and data services.