Jamming in the Internet of Things: A Game-Theoretic Perspective

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game-theoretic anti-jamming strategy for IoT systems, enabling controllers to allocate power effectively against malicious jammers, thereby maintaining network performance.

Contribution

It models the IoT jamming problem as a Colonel Blotto game and proposes an evolutionary algorithm to find equilibrium strategies for effective jamming mitigation.

Findings

The proposed algorithm maintains acceptable BER levels under jamming.

Game-theoretic model effectively predicts optimal power allocation.

Simulation confirms improved resilience of IoT networks against jamming.

Abstract

Due to its scale and largely interconnected nature, the Internet of Things (IoT) will be vulnerable to a number of security threats that range from physical layer attacks to network layer attacks. In this paper, a novel anti-jamming strategy for OFDM-based IoT systems is proposed which enables an IoT controller to protect the IoT devices against a malicious radio jammer. The interaction between the controller node and the jammer is modeled as a Colonel Blotto game with continuous and asymmetric resources in which the IoT controller, acting as defender, seeks to thwart the jamming attack by distributing its power among the subcarries in a smart way to decrease the aggregate bit error rate (BER) caused by the jammer. The jammer, on the other hand, aims at disrupting the system performance by allocating jamming power to different frequency bands. To solve the game, an evolutionary algorithm is proposed which can find a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium of the Blotto game. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm enables the IoT controller to maintain the BER above an acceptable threshold, thereby preserving the IoT network performance in the presence of malicious jamming.