On the Efficacy of Frequency Hopping in Coping with Jamming Attacks in 802.11 Networks

Abstract--Frequency hopping (FH) has been the most popularly considered approach for alleviating the effects of jamming attacks. We re-examine, the efficacy of FH based on both experimentation and analysis. Briefly, the limitations of FH are: (a) the energy spill over between adjacent channels that are considered to be orthogonal, and (b) the small number of available orthogonal bands. In a nutshell, the main contributions of our work are: (a) Construction of a measurement-driven game theoretic framework which models the interactions between a jammer and a communication link employing FH. Our model accounts for the above limiting factors and provides bounds on the performance of proactive FH in coping with jamming. (b) Extensive experimentation to quantify the impact of a jammer on 802.11a/g/n networks. Interestingly, we find that 802.11n devices can be more vulnerable to jamming as compared with legacy devices. We carefully analyze the reasons behind this observation. (c) Application ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TWC
• Authors: Konstantinos Pelechrinis, Christos Koufogiannakis, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Available Orthogonal Bands, Current 802.11 Networks, Proactive Fh, TWC 2010