TY - JOUR
T1 - SimpleMAC
T2 - A simple wireless MAC-layer countermeasure to intelligent and insider jammers
AU - Chang, Sang Yoon
AU - Hu, Yih Chun
AU - Laurenti, Nicola
N1 - Funding Information:
This material is based on work partially supported by USARO under Contract No. W-911-NF-0710287, NSF under Contract No. NSF CNS-0953600, and Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A∗STAR) under a research grant for the Human-centered Cyberphysical Systems Programme at the Advanced Digital Sciences Center.
Publisher Copyright:
© 1993-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2016/4
Y1 - 2016/4
N2 - In wireless networks, users share a transmission medium. For efficient channel use, wireless systems often use a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to perform channel coordination by having each node announce its usage intentions and other nodes avoid making conflicting transmissions. Traditionally, such announcements are made on a common control channel. However, this control channel is vulnerable to jamming because its location is pre-assigned and known to attackers. Furthermore, the announcements themselves provide information useful for jamming. We focus on a situation where transmitters share spectrum in the presence of intelligent and insider jammers capable of adaptively changing their jamming patterns. Despite the complex threat model, we propose a simple MAC scheme, called SimpleMAC, that effectively counters network compromise and MAC-aware jamming attacks. We then study the optimal adversarial behavior and analyze the performance of the proposed scheme theoretically, through Monte Carlo simulations, and by implementation on the WARP software-defined radio platform. In comparison to the Nash equilibrium alternative of disabling the MAC protocol, SimpleMAC quickly attains vastly improved performance and converges to the optimal solution (over six-fold improvement in SINR and 50% gains in channel capacity in a realistic mobile scenario).
AB - In wireless networks, users share a transmission medium. For efficient channel use, wireless systems often use a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to perform channel coordination by having each node announce its usage intentions and other nodes avoid making conflicting transmissions. Traditionally, such announcements are made on a common control channel. However, this control channel is vulnerable to jamming because its location is pre-assigned and known to attackers. Furthermore, the announcements themselves provide information useful for jamming. We focus on a situation where transmitters share spectrum in the presence of intelligent and insider jammers capable of adaptively changing their jamming patterns. Despite the complex threat model, we propose a simple MAC scheme, called SimpleMAC, that effectively counters network compromise and MAC-aware jamming attacks. We then study the optimal adversarial behavior and analyze the performance of the proposed scheme theoretically, through Monte Carlo simulations, and by implementation on the WARP software-defined radio platform. In comparison to the Nash equilibrium alternative of disabling the MAC protocol, SimpleMAC quickly attains vastly improved performance and converges to the optimal solution (over six-fold improvement in SINR and 50% gains in channel capacity in a realistic mobile scenario).
KW - Jamming
KW - medium access control (MAC)
KW - network compromise
KW - wireless network
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U2 - 10.1109/TNET.2015.2408716
DO - 10.1109/TNET.2015.2408716
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84928251941
SN - 1063-6692
VL - 24
SP - 1095
EP - 1108
JO - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
JF - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
IS - 2
M1 - 7091035
ER -