AntiJam: Efficient Medium Access despite Adaptive and Reactive Jamming

Abstract

Intentional interference constitutes a major threat for communication networks operating over a shared medium where availability is imperative. Jamming attacks are often simple and cheap to implement. In particular, today's jammers can perform physical carrier sensing in order to disrupt communication more efficiently, specially in a network of simple wireless devices such as sensor nodes, which usually operate over a single frequency (or a limited frequency band) and which cannot benefit from the use of spread spectrum or other more advanced technologies. This article proposes the medium access (MAC) protocol \textsc{AntiJam} that is provably robust against a powerful reactive adversary who can jam a $(1-ε)$-portion of the time steps, where $ε$ is an arbitrary constant. The adversary uses carrier sensing to make informed decisions on when it is most harmful to disrupt communications; moreover, we allow the adversary to be adaptive and to have complete knowledge of the entire protocol history. Our MAC protocol is able to make efficient use of the non-jammed time periods and achieves an asymptotically optimal, $Θ{(1)}$-competitive throughput in this harsh scenario. In addition, \textsc{AntiJam} features a low convergence time and has good fairness properties. Our simulation results validate our theoretical results and also show that our algorithm manages to guarantee constant throughput where the 802.11 MAC protocol basically fails to deliver any packets.