Hierarchical coordinated anti-jamming channel access in clustering networks: a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game approach

Abstract

This paper mainly investigates the multi-user coordinated anti-jamming problem in clustering communication networks. In such kinds of networks, there exist multiple clusters and multiple users who communicate with their receivers simultaneously. Besides, a malicious jammer persistently attacks channels with wide-band and dynamic changing jamming signals. To cope with these challenges brought by the large-scale clustering network and the dynamic wide-band jamming, a hierarchical coordinated anti-jamming approach is proposed, and a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game is introduced to model the anti-jamming problem. In detail, cluster heads act as leaders, and select available frequency bands to avoid jamming attacks, while users in each cluster act as followers and select corresponding channels distributedly and independently. Moreover, it is proved that there exist multiple Stackelberg equilibriums (SEs) in the proposed game. To obtain SEs, a hierarchical coordinated anti-jamming channel access (HCACA) algorithm is designed. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed approach is effective to cope with the dynamic wide-band jamming attacks. Furthermore, it is also depicted that the proposed approach outperforms the distributed anti-jamming comparative approach in terms of convergence speed.