This paper presents a simple local medium access control protocol, called , for multi-hop wireless networks with a single channel that is provably robust against adaptive adversarial jamming. The wireless network is modeled as a unit disk graph on a set of nodes distributed arbitrarily in the plane. In addition to these nodes, there are adversarial jammers that know the protocol and its entire history and that are allowed to jam the wireless channel at any node for an arbitrary @math -fraction of the time steps, where @math is an arbitrary constant. We assume that the nodes cannot distinguish between jammed transmissions and collisions of regular messages. Nevertheless, we show that achieves an asymptotically optimal throughput if there is a sufficiently dense distribution of nodes.
@cite_4: In this paper we consider the problem of designing a medium access control (MAC) protocol for single-hop wireless networks that is provably robust against adaptive adversarial jamming. The wireless network consists of a set of honest and reliable nodes that are within the transmission range of each other. In addition to these nodes there is an adversary. The adversary may know the protocol and its entire history and use this knowledge to jam the wireless channel at will at any time. It is allowed to jam a (1-epsilon)-fraction of the time steps, for an arbitrary constant epsilon>0, but it has to make a jamming decision before it knows the actions of the nodes at the current step. The nodes cannot distinguish between the adversarial jamming or a collision of two or more messages that are sent at the same time. We demonstrate, for the first time, that there is a local-control MAC protocol requiring only very limited knowledge about the adversary and the network that achieves a constant throughput for the non-jammed time steps under any adversarial strategy above. We also show that our protocol is very energy efficient and that it can be extended to obtain a robust and efficient protocol for leader election and the fair use of the wireless channel.
@cite_6: In this paper, we study the performance of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol under a range of jammers that covers both channel-oblivious and channel-aware jamming. We study two channel-oblivious jammers: a periodic jammer that jams deterministically at a specified rate, and a memoryless jammer whose signals arrive according to a Poisson process. We also develop new models for channel-aware jamming, including a reactive jammer that only jams non-colliding transmissions and an omniscient jammer that optimally adjusts its strategy according to current states of the participating nodes. Our study comprises of a theoretical analysis of the saturation throughput of 802.11 under jamming, an extensive simulation study, and a testbed to conduct real world experimentation of jamming IEEE 802.11 using GNU Radio and USRP platform. In our theoretical analysis, we use a discrete-time Markov chain analysis to derive formulae for the saturation throughput of IEEE 802.11 under memoryless, reactive and omniscient jamming. One of our key results is a characterization of optimal omniscient jamming that establishes a lower bound on the saturation throughput of 802.11 under arbitrary jammer attacks. We validate the theoretical analysis by means of Qualnet simulations. Finally, we measure the real-world performance of periodic and memoryless jammers using our GNU radio jammer prototype.
Our work is motivated by the work in @cite_6 and @cite_4 . In @cite_6 it is shown that an adaptive jammer can dramatically reduce the throughput of the standard MAC protocol used in IEEE 802.11 with only limited energy cost on the adversary side. @cite_4 initiated the study of throughput-competitive MAC protocols under continuously running, adaptive jammers, but they only consider single-hop wireless networks. We go one step further by considering where different nodes can have different channel states at a time, e.g., a transmission may be received only by a fraction of the nodes. It turns out that while the MAC protocol of @cite_4 can be adopted to the multi-hop setting with a small modification, the proof techniques cannot. We are not aware of any other theoretical work on MAC protocols for multi-hop networks with provable performance against adaptive jamming.