Reliable Communication under the Influence of a State-Constrained Jammer: A Novel Perspective on Receive Diversity

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that using multiple antennas or frequencies in vehicular communication systems can prevent system failure caused by unknown interference, ensuring reliable data transmission even under worst-case jamming scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis showing that three antennas or frequencies can avoid symmetrizability in AVCs, guaranteeing positive capacity and revealing super-activation phenomena.

Findings

Three antennas or frequencies prevent system breakdown.

Capacity remains positive with three diversity options.

Super-activation of capacity is demonstrated in AVCs.

Abstract

The question of robust direct communication in vehicular networks is discussed. In most state-of-the-art approaches, there is no central entity controlling channel access, so there may be arbitrary interference from other parties. Thus, a suitable channel model for Vehicle-to-X (V2X) communication is the Arbitrarily Varying Channel (AVC). Employing multiple antennas on a vehicle or sending over multiple frequencies to make use of diversity are promising approaches to combat interference. In this setup, an important question about diversity is how many antennas or orthogonal carrier frequencies are necessary in order to avoid system breakdown due to unknown interference in AVCs. For Binary Symmetric AVCs (AVBSC) and a physically meaningful identical state-constrained jammer, the deployment of a third, uncorrelated receiving antenna or the parallel transmission over three different orthogonal frequencies avoids symmetrizability and thus ensures positivity of the capacity of the overall communication channel. Furthermore, the capacity of the identical state-constrained composite AVBSC is continuous and shows super-activation, a phenomenon which was hitherto deemed impossible for classical communication without secrecy constraints. Subsuming, spatial and frequency diversity are enablers for reliable communication over communication channels with arbitrarily varying interference.