Enhancing wireless security against reactive jamming attacks: A game-theoretical framework

Reactive jamming, which launches jamming attacks when the legitimate transmissions are detected, is one of the most serious security threats in wireless communications. In this paper, we investigate the wireless security issue in the presence of a reactive jammer from a game-theoretical perspective. Specifically, the legitimate user and jammer respectively aim at maximize and minimize the expected legitimate transmission rate, which is formulated as a zero-sum game. For the jammer, we consider the imperfection in detection and analyze the optimal jamming strategy by the joint optimization over detection time and jamming power. For the legitimate user, the transmit power is optimized by achieving the tradeoff between obtained transmission rate and the probability to be accurately detected and thus jammed by its adversary. The Nash equilibrium is characterized by the best-response playing between the legitimate user and reactive jammer. Finally, we present simulation results to verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach.