Game theoretic anti-jamming dynamic frequency hopping and rate adaptation in wireless systems

Abstract

Wireless transmissions are inherently broadcast and are vulnerable to jamming attacks. Frequency hopping (FH) and transmission rate adaptation (RA) have been used to mitigate jamming. However, recent works have shown that using either FH or RA (but not both) is inefficient against smart jamming. In this paper, we propose mitigating jamming by jointly optimizing the FH and RA techniques. We consider a power constrained “reactive-sweep” jammer who aims at degrading the goodput of a wireless link. We model the interaction between the legitimate transmitter and jammer as a zero-sum Markov game, and derive the optimal defense strategy. Numerical investigations show that the new scheme improves the average goodput and provides better jamming resiliency.