4th International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks

Research Article

Jamming Mitigation in Multi-Radio Wireless Networks: Reactive or Proactive?

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1145/1460877.1460912,
        author={Sherif Khattab and Daniel Mosse and Rami Melhem},
        title={Jamming Mitigation in Multi-Radio Wireless Networks: Reactive or Proactive?},
        proceedings={4th International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={SECURECOMM},
        year={2008},
        month={9},
        keywords={Jamming Multi-radio Max-min Games},
        doi={10.1145/1460877.1460912}
    }
    
  • Sherif Khattab
    Daniel Mosse
    Rami Melhem
    Year: 2008
    Jamming Mitigation in Multi-Radio Wireless Networks: Reactive or Proactive?
    SECURECOMM
    ACM
    DOI: 10.1145/1460877.1460912
Sherif Khattab1,*, Daniel Mosse1,*, Rami Melhem1,*
  • 1: Computer Science Department University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260
*Contact email: skhattab@cs.pitt.edu, mosse@pitt.edu, melhem@pitt.edu

Abstract

Jamming is a serious security problem in wireless networks. Recently, software-based channel hopping has received attention as a jamming countermeasure. In particular, proactive, or periodic, channel hopping has been studied more extensively than reactive hopping. In this paper, we address the question of which of the two defense strategies, namely proactive and reactive channel-hopping, provides better jamming resiliency than the other? in the context of single- and multi-radio wireless devices. In the single-radio context, we develop theoretical models to analyze the blocking probability for combinations of defense and attack strategies. In the multi-radio setting, we formulate the jamming problem as a max-min game and show through simulation that the game outcome depends on the payooff function. Our results show that reactive defense provides better jamming tolerance than proactive when considering communication availability. However, both reactive and proactive defenses have almost the same performance when energy efficiency is considered as a performance metric.