On The Security of AoA Estimation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the security vulnerabilities of AoA estimation under jamming in Rician channels, deriving optimal strategies for both jammer and receiver, and demonstrating the robustness of ML estimators against such attacks.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of AoA estimation security, deriving optimal jamming and estimation strategies, and highlights the robustness of ML estimators in hostile environments.

Findings

Optimal jammer strategy mimics training sequence.

ML AoA estimator remains optimal under jamming.

Jammer's power allocation critically affects estimation accuracy.

Abstract

Angle of Arrival (AoA) estimation has found its way to a wide range of applications. Much attention have been paid to study different techniques for AoA estimation and its applications for jamming suppression, however, security vulnerability issues of AoA estimation itself under hostile activity have not been paid the same attention. In this paper, the problem of AoA estimation in Rician flat fading channel under jamming condition is investigated. We consider the scenario in which a receiver with multiple antenna is trying to estimate the AoA of the specular line of sight (LOS) component of signal received from a given single antenna transmitter using a predefined training sequence. A jammer equipped with multiple antennas is trying to interrupt the AoA estimation phase by sending an arbitrary signal. We derive the optimal jammer and receiver strategies in various scenarios based on the knowledge of the opponent strategies and the available information about the communication channel. In all scenarios, we derive the optimal jammer signal design as well as its optimal power allocation policy. The results show the optimality of the training based Maximum Likelihood (ML) AoA estimator in case of randomly generated jamming signal. We also show that, the optimal jammer strategy is to emit a signal identical to the predefined training sequence turning the estimation process into a highest power competition scenario in which the detected AoA is the one for the transmitting entity of higher power. The obtained results are supported by the provided computer simulation.