Defeating jamming with the power of silence: a game-theoretic analysis

The timing channel is a logical communicationchannel in which information is encoded in the timing betweenevents. Recently, the use of the timing channel has been proposedas a countermeasure to reactive jamming attacks performed byan energy-constrained malicious node. In fact, whilst a jammeris able to disrupt the information contained in the attackedpackets, timing information cannot be jammed and, therefore,timing channels can be exploited to deliver information to thereceiver even on a jammed channel.Since the nodes under attack and the jammer have conflictinginterests, their interactions can be modeled by means of gametheory. Accordingly, in this paper a game-theoretic model ofthe interactions between nodes exploiting the timing channelto achieve resilience to jamming attacks and a jammer isderived and analyzed. More specifically, the Nash equilibriumis studied in the terms of existence, uniqueness, and convergenceunder best response dynamics. Furthermore, the case in whichthe communication nodes set their strategy and the jammerreacts accordingly is modeled and analyzed as a Stackelberggame, by considering both perfect and imperfect knowledge ofthe jammer’s utility function. Extensive numerical results arepresented, showing the impact of network parameters on thesystem performance.