Asynchronous Channel-Hopping Scheme under Jamming Attacks

Abstract

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) are considered an attractive technology to mitigate inefficiency in the usage of licensed spectrum. CRNs allow the secondary users (SUs) to access the unused licensed spectrum and use a blind rendezvous process to establish communication links between SUs. In particular, quorum-based channel-hopping (CH) schemes have been studied recently to provide guaranteed blind rendezvous in decentralized CRNs without using global time synchronization. However, these schemes remain vulnerable to jamming attacks. In this paper, we first analyze the limitations of quorum-based rendezvous schemes called asynchronous channel hopping (ACH). Then, we introduce a novel sequence sensing jamming attack (SSJA) model in which a sophisticated jammer can dramatically reduce the rendezvous success rates of ACH schemes. In addition, we propose a fast and robust asynchronous rendezvous scheme (FRARS) that can significantly enhance robustness under jamming attacks. Our numerical results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed scheme vastly outperforms the ACH scheme when there are security concerns about a sequence sensing jammer.

Smart Jamming Attacks in Wireless Networks During a Transmission Cycle: Stackelberg Game with Hierarchical Learning Solution

“…At the beginning of the n-th transmission cycle, the transmitter first takes action and the decision making of its power action P n is based on the transmission state in the previous transmission cycle, i.e., s t n = (J n−1 ). sequentially, based on the observed state s j n = (P n ), the jammer chooses its optimal power J n given by (14). The received utility value of the transmitter is denoted by u n .…”

“…Compared to the approaches used in previous works [12], [13], [14], [15], [17], etc. we are interested here in the impact of a smart jammer on the transmitter power levels during the period that starts at the first attempt of a packet transmission until the next packet transmission first attempt, due to the fact that when re-transmissions are used, the jammers cause the effective network activity factor (and hence the interference among the Receiver Sides (RSs) to be doubled [24].…”