SimpleMAC: a jamming-resilient MAC-layer protocol for wireless channel coordination

In wireless networks, users share a transmission medium. To increase the efficiency of the channel, wireless systems often use a medium access control (MAC) protocol perform channel coordination by having each node announce its usage intentions to minimize interference from other nodes in the same network. Traditionally, in a multi-channel environment, such announcements are made on a common control channel. However, such a channel is vulnerable to jamming because its location is pre-assigned and known to attackers. Furthermore, the announcements themselves provide information useful for jamming. In this paper, we focus on a situation where multiple wireless transmitters share spectrum in the presence of intelligent and possibly insider jammers capable of dynamically and adaptively changing their jamming patterns. We develop a framework for effectively countering MAC-aware jamming attacks and then propose two schemes (Simple Transmitter Strategy and Simple Signaling Scheme) that are easily analyzed using game theory and show how they restrict optimal adversarial behavior. We evaluate our schemes three ways: mathematically, through Monte Carlo simulations, and by implementation on the WARP software-defined radio platform. Our schemes provides very rapid improvement over the alternative of not using any MAC protocol, and eventually converges to optimal performance (over fifteen-fold improvement in SINR and 50% gains in Shannon capacity in a realistic mobile scenario).