Countering jamming attacks against beam alignment protocol for millimeter wave networks

Abstract

In millimeter-wave (MMW) multiple-input multiple-output systems, an initial beam alignment (BA) phase between the base station (BS) and users is required to compensate for the high propagation loss. The BA procedure specified for 5th Generation New Radio is fast and precise in the presence of non-malicious interference and noise. A smart jammer, however, might launch an attack during the BA phase in order to hinder the correct beam selection. We investigate the effects of a jamming attack in MMW systems during the BA phase and propose a jamming resistant scheme based on the idea of randomized probing. The proposed solution consists of randomly altering the probing sequence transmitted by the BS in order to reject the jamming signal at the user side via a subspace-based technique based on orthogonal projections and jamming cancellation.