Efficient jamming attack against MIMO transceiver

Abstract

This work addresses the issue of point-to-point intelligent jamming against MIMO architecture-based systems. The receiver uses an optimal Maximum Likelihood (ML) detector to extract the data stream from the received signal. Analyzing the receiver performance in the presence of a jamming signal, optimal attack strategies based on the pairwise error probability parameter as an objective function are designed, enabling the achievement of maximum degradation of the service quality. To perform the worst-case jamming of a legitimate transceiver, we assume that the jammer can eavesdrop on the Channel State Information (CSI). Depending on the jamming power budget constraint and the potential of jamming systems to estimate the CSI, different scenarios are envisaged, including imperfect CSI estimation cases. By minimizing the trace of Positive Semi-Definite (PSD) matrix products, the optimal jamming approaches that ensure maximum degradation of the legitimate link are designed. The disruption efficiency of the proposed approaches is comparable to the employment of the brute-force attack, but with a higher power level that is proportional to the number of jamming antennas in the case of partial knowledge of CSI, and inversely to the statistical expectation of the square root of the Wishart matrix's eigenvalues in the case of complete knowledge of CSI. To justify the relevance of the suggested policy, extensive simulations of the effect of these interventions are presented.