Freedom of speech: thwarting jammers via a probabilistic approach

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a lightweight, fully distributed, and probabilistic protocol---Freedom of Speech (FoS)---that assures the delivery of a message to be broadcast (to N nodes) notwithstanding the presence of a powerful jammer. FoS enjoys several features when compared to competing schemes: it requires each node to store just N symmetric pairwise keys; node joining and node eviction require just minimal intervention on the already operating nodes; and, it is highly efficient in terms of required computation and message exchange. We provide a thorough analysis on the number of communications required by FoS to broadcast a message. We show that FoS is comparable to the state of the art solution under a realistic scenario, while it enjoys unique properties such as an optimal network reconfiguration and low overhead as for both computation and storage Extensive simulations support our findings.