A Game-Theoretic Approach to Anti-jamming in Sensor Networks

Abstract

Jamming is a serious security threat to a wireless sensor network since the network relies on open wireless radio channel. A jamming attacker launches jamming attacks easily by transmitting high-power signals and all legitimate sensor nodes interfered by jamming signals suffer corrupted packet transmissions. More importantly, the jammer is typically strategic and chooses its jamming strategy in response to the possible defense strategy taken by the sensor network. In this paper we model the interaction between the sensor network and the attacker as a non-cooperative non-zero-sum static game. In such a game, the sensor network has a set of strategies of controlling its probability of accessing the wireless channel and the attacker manipulates its jamming by controlling its jamming probability after sensing a transmission activity. We propose an efficient algorithm for computing the optimal strategies for jamming attack and network defense. A critical issue is that there may exist a number of possible strategy profiles of Nash equilibria. To address this issue, we further propose to choose realistic Nash equilibria by applying Pareto-dominance and risk dominance. Our numerical results demonstrate that the strategies chosen by Pareto-dominance and risk dominance achieve the expected performance. Our results presented in the paper provides valuable defense guidance for wireless sensor networks against jamming attacks.