A dynamic jamming game for real-time status updates

Abstract

We study timely status updates of a real-time system in an adversarial setting. The system samples a physical process, and sends the samples from the source (e.g., a sensor) to the destination (e.g, a control center) through a channel. For realtime monitoring/control tasks, it is crucial for the system to update the status of the physical process "timely". We measure the timeliness of status updates by the time elapsed since the latest update at the destination was generated at the source, and define the time elapsed as age of information, or age in short. To sabotage the system, an attacker aims to maximize the age by jamming the channel and hence causing delay in status updates. The system aims to minimize the age by judiciously choosing when to sample and send the updates. We model the ongoing repeated interaction between the attacker and the system as a dynamic game. In each stage game, the attacker chooses the jamming time according to the jamming time distribution, and the system responds by delaying the sampling according to the sampling policy. We prove that there exists a unique stationary equilibrium in the game, and provide a complete analytical characterization of the equilibrium. Our results shed lights on how the attacker sabotages the system and how the system should defend against the attacker.

Performance Analysis of a MIMO System with Bursty Traffic in the presence of Energy Harvesting Jammer

“…The authors derived an optimal scheduling policy that can minimize the AoI over the networks. Furthermore, the effect of jamming on AoI has been studied in [27], [28]. Characterizing the stability region for multiuser scenarios is a challenging problem due to the interaction between the queues [29], [30].…”

Age of Information Aware Communication Systems : Modeling and Performance Analysis

“…Furthermore, a diversity of additional features of a communication system have been studied in relation to AoI. Among these features, imperfect packet transmission has been considered in the context of a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) mechanism [95,96,97] and a data protection scheme [98,99]. In [100] a packet management mechanism that controls packets by attaching a deadline constraint to them is proposed.…”

WiFresh: Age-of-Information from Theory to Implementation

“…Queueing Theory is used in [23], [30], [31], [32], [33] to characterize the AoI performance of various important queueing systems. Game Theory is used in [34], [35], [36] to analyze the impact of communication interference on AoI. Information Theory is used in [37], [38] for designing source and channel coding schemes to improve AoI.…”