Cooperative relay beamforming for control channel jamming in vehicular networks

Abstract

Radio Frequency (RF) jamming attacks constitute a major threat to the availability of control channel communications in the vehicular networks. In particular, the victim vehicles may fail to receive the safety related messages from the Road Side Unit (RSU) due to persistent jamming attacks, which can possibly cause tremendous economic loss and claim human lives. In this paper, we propose a cooperative anti-jamming beamforming scheme for the control channel jamming problem in vehicular networks, which takes advantage of the multi-antenna and spatial diversity provided by the RSU and relay vehicles to improve the transmission reliability of the victim vehicles. The anti-jamming beamformer design problem is formulated as a Mixed-integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problem, which is intractable in general. We address this challenging problem by reformulating it as a sequence of convex sub-problems using the semi-definite relaxation (SDR) and convex-concave procedure (CCP) methods. Simulation results are provided to investigate the convergence of the proposed scheme, and significant performance gain can be observed comparing with other benchmark schemes.