On Jamming Against Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the impact of randomly deployed jammers on wireless networks, deriving analytical expressions for outage and error probabilities, and revealing how jammer effectiveness varies with network parameters and density.

Contribution

It provides new analytical models for jamming effects on wireless networks and explores how jammer deployment scales with network density and parameters.

Findings

Jammers can increase outage probability from 1% to 80% with just one jammer per BS/AP.

Jammers double the effective network activity factor when retransmissions are used.

The required number of jammers varies non-linearly with BS/AP density, showing concave behavior.

Abstract

In this paper, we study jamming attacks against wireless networks. Specifically, we consider a network of base stations (BS) or access points (AP) and investigate the impact of a fixed number of jammers that are randomly deployed according to a Binomial point process. We shed light on the network performance in terms of a) the outage probability and b) the error probability of a victim receiver in the downlink of this wireless network. We derive analytical expressions for both these metrics and discuss in detail how the jammer network must adapt to the various wireless network parameters in order to effectively attack the victim receivers. For instance, we will show that with only 1 jammer per BS/AP a) the outage probability of the wireless network can be increased from 1% (as seen in the non-jamming case) to 80% and b) when retransmissions are used, the jammers cause the effective network activity factor (and hence the interference among the BSs) to be doubled. Furthermore, we show that the behavior of the jammer network as a function of the BS/AP density is not obvious. In particular, an interesting concave-type behavior is seen which indicates that the number of jammers required to attack the wireless network must scale with the BS density only until a certain value beyond which it decreases. In the context of error probability of the victim receiver, we study whether or not some recent results related to jamming in the point-to-point link scenario can be extended to the case of jamming against wireless networks. Numerical results are presented to validate the theoretical inferences presented.