Fight jamming with jamming - A game theoretic analysis of jamming attack in wireless networks and defense strategy

In wireless networks, jamming is an easily mountable attack with detrimental effects on the victim network. Existing defense strategies mainly consist of retreating from the jammer or rerouting traffic around the jammed area. In this paper, we tackle the problem from a different angle. Motivated by the high energy-consuming nature of jamming, we propose our defense strategy to defeat the jammer by draining its energy as fast as possible. To gain an in-depth insight on jamming and to evaluate the proposed defense strategy, we model the interaction between the jammer and the victim network as a non-cooperative game which is proven to admit two equilibria. We demonstrate analytically that the proposed defense strategy can eliminate the undesirable equilibrium from the network's perspective and increase the jammer's energy consumption at the remaining equilibrium without degrading the performance of the victim network. We also investigate the game dynamics by developing the update mechanism for the players to adjust their strategies based on only observable channel information. Numerical study is then conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy. Results demonstrate its effectiveness in defeating jamming, especially when the jammer is aggressive. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.