Competitive MAC under Adversarial SINR

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new adversarial SINR model for wireless communication under interference and jamming, and proposes a distributed MAC protocol that guarantees constant competitive throughput despite adversarial interference.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel adversarial SINR interference model and a distributed MAC protocol that achieves constant competitive throughput under this model.

Findings

The protocol maintains constant throughput with high probability.

It effectively counters adaptive jamming within energy constraints.

The model captures a wide range of interference phenomena.

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of how to efficiently share a wireless medium which is subject to harsh external interference or even jamming. While this problem has already been studied intensively for simplistic single-hop or unit disk graph models, we make a leap forward and study MAC protocols for the SINR interference model (a.k.a. the physical model). We make two contributions. First, we introduce a new adversarial SINR model which captures a wide range of interference phenomena. Concretely, we consider a powerful, adaptive adversary which can jam nodes at arbitrary times and which is only limited by some energy budget. The second contribution of this paper is a distributed MAC protocol which provably achieves a constant competitive throughput in this environment: we show that, with high probability, the protocol ensures that a constant fraction of the non-blocked time periods is used for successful transmissions.