Attack strategies and reliability analysis of Wireless Mesh Networks considering cascading failures

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are vital to modern infrastructure, and attacks on WMNs can lead to paralysis of interdependent systems, causing significant social and economic consequences. However, existing studies often assume all attacks coincide, focusing on cascading failures from a single perspective while neglecting specific attack strategies. This study is the first to apply sequential attack strategies to WMNs and conduct a comparative analysis with synchronous strategies. First, we propose a system model for WMNs that incorporates path loss and link capacity, representing real-world scenarios. Secondly, we introduce two novel reliability metrics, transmission reliability and reliability degradation rate, to quantify the impact of attacks. In the final case study, we analyze the effects of synchronous and sequential attack strategies under four node attack rules. Results reveal that sequential attack strategies dynamically identify and exploit critical nodes, causing prolonged degradation of transmission reliability and amplifying cascading failures. Compared to synchronous attack strategies, sequential attack strategies increase the global reliability degradation rate and reliability degradation rate during the attack phase by 28.62 % and 55.36 %, respectively. Therefore, sequential attack strategies should combine these two node attack rules to achieve maximum impact. These findings confirm that the proposed sequential attack strategy effectively disrupts network performance and provides meaningful insights for developing WMN defense strategies.