Competitive throughput in multi-hop wireless networks despite adaptive jamming

Abstract

This article presents a simple local medium access control protocol, called Jade, for multi-hop wireless networks with a single channel that is provably robust against adaptive adversarial jamming. The wireless network is modeled as a unit disk graph on a set of nodes distributed arbitrarily in the plane. In addition to these nodes, there are adversarial jammers that know the protocol and its entire history and that are allowed to jam the wireless channel at any node for an arbitrary $$(1-\epsilon )$$ -fraction of the time steps, where $$0<\epsilon <1$$ is an arbitrary constant. We assume that nodes can perform collision detection (unless they are transmitting themselves), but that they cannot distinguish between jammed transmissions and collisions of regular messages. Nevertheless, we show that Jade achieves an asymptotically optimal throughput by efficiently exploiting the unpredictable time periods in which the medium is available.