Defending against Cross-Technology Jamming in Heterogeneous IoT Systems

Abstract

The wide deployment of IoT devices has resulted in a critical shortage of spectrum resources. Many IoT devices coexist on the same spectrum band, where the network performance is always degraded. As a promising solution, the Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) enables the direct communication among heterogeneous IoT devices. Unfortunately, the emerging cross-technology attacks have demonstrated their high success rates in terms of spoofing the end IoT devices or jamming the communication channels. In this paper, we investigate a novel cross-technology jamming issue for a distributed heterogeneous IoT system. Compared with traditional jamming methods, the cross-technology jammer has a much higher jamming power, wider jamming bandwidth, and stronger stealthiness, all of which deserve a complete re-thinking of defensive mechanisms. Therefore, we propose a hybrid anti-jamming scheme that jointly considers frequency hopping and power control techniques. Specifically, we model the anti-jamming process as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and adopt Deep Q-Network (DQN) to find the optimal strategy. Extensive real-world experiments show that the goodput (payload data) of our anti-jamming scheme can achieve up to 2X and 1.39X than the passive and random anti-jamming approaches, respectively. In particular, our anti-jamming scheme provides 78% of goodput with the presence of a cross-technology jammer, outperforming existing passive and random anti-jamming scheme designs at 37.6% and 54.1%.