Capacity of Large-Scale Wireless Networks Under Jamming: Modeling and Analyses

Abstract

Distributed jamming has important applications not only in the military context but also in the civilian context, where spectrum sharing is increasingly used and inadvertent jamming becomes a reality. In this paper, we derive the capacity bounds of wireless networks in the presence of jamming. We show that when the density of jammers is higher than that of target nodes by a certain threshold, the capacity of wireless networks approaches zero as the numbers of target nodes and jammers go to infinity. This is true even when the total power of target nodes is much higher than that of the jammers. We provide the optimal communication schemes to achieve the capacity bounds. We also describe the power efficiency of wireless networks, showing that there is an optimal target node density for power-efficient network operation. Our results can provide guidance for designing optimal wireless networking protocols that have to deal with large-scale distributed jamming.