Defeating Jamming With the Power of Silence: A Game-Theoretic Analysis

The timing channel is a logical communication channel in which information is encoded in the timing between events. Recently, the use of the timing channel has been proposed as a countermeasure to reactive jamming attacks performed by an energy-constrained malicious node. In fact, while a jammer is...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on wireless communications 2015-05, Vol.14 (5), p.2337-2352
Main Authors: D'Oro, Salvatore, Galluccio, Laura, Morabito, Giacomo, Palazzo, Sergio, Chen, Lin, Martignon, Fabio
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anti-jamming
Channels
Computer Science
Dynamical systems
Dynamics
Economic models
Energy consumption
Game theory
Game-Theoretic Models
Games
Jammers
Jamming
Mathematical models
Nash equilibrium
Networking and Internet Architecture
Receivers
Time measurements
Timing
Timing Channel
Wireless communication
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Summary:The timing channel is a logical communication channel in which information is encoded in the timing between events. Recently, the use of the timing channel has been proposed as a countermeasure to reactive jamming attacks performed by an energy-constrained malicious node. In fact, while a jammer is able to disrupt the information contained in the attacked packets, timing information cannot be jammed, and therefore, timing channels can be exploited to deliver information to the receiver even on a jammed channel. Since the nodes under attack and the jammer have conflicting interests, their interactions can be modeled by means of game theory. Accordingly, in this paper, a game-theoretic model of the interactions between nodes exploiting the timing channel to achieve resilience to jamming attacks and a jammer is derived and analyzed. More specifically, the Nash equilibrium is studied in terms of existence, uniqueness, and convergence under best response dynamics. Furthermore, the case in which the communication nodes set their strategy and the jammer reacts accordingly is modeled and analyzed as a Stackelberg game, by considering both perfect and imperfect knowledge of the jammer's utility function. Extensive numerical results are presented, showing the impact of network parameters on the system performance.
ISSN:1536-1276
1558-2248
DOI:10.1109/TWC.2014.2385709