Jamming in the Internet of Things: A Game-Theoretic Perspective

Due to its scale and largely interconnected nature, the Internet of Things (IoT) will be vulnerable to a number of security threats that range from physical layer attacks to network layer attacks. In this paper, a novel anti-jamming strategy for OFDM-based IoT systems is proposed which enables an IoT controller to protect the IoT devices against a malicious radio jammer. The interactions between the controller node and the jammer are modeled as a Colonel Blotto game with continuous and asymmetric resources. In this game, the IoT controller, acting as defender, seeks to thwart the jamming attack by distributing its power among the subcarries in a smart way so as to decrease the aggregate bit error rate (BER) caused by the jammer. The jammer, on the other hand, aims at disrupting the system performance by allocating its jamming power to different frequency bands. To solve the game, an evolutionary algorithm is proposed which can find a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium of the Blotto game. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm enables the IoT controller to maintain the BER above an acceptable threshold, thereby preserving the IoT network performance in the presence of malicious jamming.