Impact of RTS/CTS jamming attacks in IEEE 802.11ah dense networks

IoT, a cornerstone in the development of the 21st century's city, has presented different use cases with a multitude of challenges. In response to these challenges mainly characterized by the ubiquitous connectivity and the large-scale deployment, IEEE 802.11 committee issued the AH version of the standard. The main enhancements featured in this amendment are the support of up to 8000 stations interconnected within a 1 km radius. Despite the promising large coverage and the high number of stations that an IEEE802.11ah access point can handle, Wi-Fi HaLow still faces many security challenges. This paper studies the response of a network to jamming attacks based on control packets. It provides an overview of the introduced features within this amendment of the standard and presents alarming results showing how it is not fit to mitigate jamming attacks.