Communication Through Jamming over a Slotted ALOHA Channel

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the capacity of illegitimate jamming strategies to communicate covertly over a slotted ALOHA channel, deriving bounds that reveal the limits of such covert communication under various system loads.

Contribution

It introduces bounds on the jamming capacity in a slotted ALOHA system with illegitimate users, considering stochastic queue dynamics and various jamming strategies.

Findings

Achievable jamming rates are derived for i.i.d. strategies.

Upper bounds on jamming capacity are established for ergodic policies.

Bounds become tight as system load approaches maximum.

Abstract

This work derives bounds on the jamming capacity of a slotted ALOHA system. A system with n legitimate users, each with a Bernoulli arrival process is considered. Packets are temporarily stored at the corresponding user queues, and a slotted ALOHA strategy is used for packet transmissions over the shared channel. The scenario considered is that of a pair of illegitimate users that jam legitimate transmissions in order to communicate over the slotted ALOHA channel. Jamming leads to binary signaling between the illegitimate users, with packet collisions due to legitimate users treated as (multiplicative) noise in this channel. Further, the queueing dynamics at the legitimate users stochastically couples the jamming strategy used by the illegitimate users and the channel evolution. By considering various i.i.d. jamming strategies, achievable jamming rates over the slotted ALOHA channel are derived. Further, an upper bound on the jamming capacity over the class of all ergodic jamming policies is derived. These bounds are shown to be tight in the limit where the offered system load approaches unity.