"Borrowing Arrows with Thatched Boats": The Art of Defeating Reactive Jammers in IoT Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel deception-based strategy inspired by military tactics to help resource-constrained IoT devices defeat reactive jammers by stimulating and leveraging their signals for energy harvesting and communication.

Contribution

It introduces a new deception strategy combined with a deep reinforcement learning framework enabling IoT devices to effectively counter reactive jamming attacks without prior jammer information.

Findings

Effective in defeating reactive jammers in simulations

Leverages jammer signals for energy harvesting and data transmission

Enhances IoT network performance through jammer exploitation

Abstract

In this article, we introduce a novel deception strategy which is inspired by the "Borrowing Arrows with Thatched Boats", one of the most famous military tactics in the history, in order to defeat reactive jamming attacks for low-power IoT networks. Our proposed strategy allows resource-constrained IoT devices to be able to defeat powerful reactive jammers by leveraging their own jamming signals. More specifically, by stimulating the jammer to attack the channel through transmitting fake transmissions, the IoT system can not only undermine the jammer's power, but also harvest energy or utilize jamming signals as a communication means to transmit data through using RF energy harvesting and ambient backscatter techniques, respectively. Furthermore, we develop a low-cost deep reinforcement learning framework that enables the hardware-constrained IoT device to quickly obtain an optimal defense policy without requiring any information about the jammer in advance. Simulation results reveal that our proposed framework can not only be very effective in defeating reactive jamming attacks, but also leverage jammer's power to enhance system performance for the IoT network.