Hierarchical coordinated anti-jamming channel access in clustering networks: a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game approach

Yifan Xu,Guoxin Li,Jin Chen,Zhibin Feng,Kailing Yao,Gui Fang,Fei Song

doi:10.1186/s13634-021-00764-0

Abstract

This paper mainly investigates the multi-user coordinated anti-jamming problem in clustering communication networks. In such kinds of networks, there exist multiple clusters and multiple users who communicate with their receivers simultaneously. Besides, a malicious jammer persistently attacks channels with wide-band and dynamic changing jamming signals. To cope with these challenges brought by the large-scale clustering network and the dynamic wide-band jamming, a hierarchical coordinated anti-jamming approach is proposed, and a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game is introduced to model the anti-jamming problem. In detail, cluster heads act as leaders, and select available frequency bands to avoid jamming attacks, while users in each cluster act as followers and select corresponding channels distributedly and independently. Moreover, it is proved that there exist multiple Stackelberg equilibriums (SEs) in the proposed game. To obtain SEs, a hierarchical coordinated anti-jamming channel access (HCACA) algorithm is designed. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed approach is effective to cope with the dynamic wide-band jamming attacks. Furthermore, it is also depicted that the proposed approach outperforms the distributed anti-jamming comparative approach in terms of convergence speed.

Highlights

With the development of wireless communication technologies, the number of wireless communication devices increases explosively, causing severe shortage of spectrum resources
Proof In the above subsections, we proved that there exist at least one Nash equilibrium (NE) strategy combination A∗1, · · · A∗H for the leaders’ sub-game, which maximizes the cumulative utility of all cluster heads, chooses optimal spectrum bands that are not jammed by the malicious jammer
Cluster heads acted as leaders, and selected available frequency bands to avoid jamming attacks

Summary

Introduction

With the development of wireless communication technologies, the number of wireless communication devices increases explosively, causing severe shortage of spectrum resources. Focusing on the internal coordination and external confrontation problem for effective spectrum resource utilization, game theory [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14] is a feasible tool to model and analysis the internal and external competitive or cooperative relationships among different decision-makers (i.e., users or malicious jammer). As for internal coordination, authors in [6] reviewed the decision-theoretic solutions for channel access strategies in the opportunistic spectrum access system and presented some effective game models with respect to internal interference avoidance. Authors in [7] reviewed the applications of repeated games in wireless networks, while authors in [8] formulated users’ competition for channel access using a non-cooperative game and proved that the proposed game model is an ordinal potential game where there exists at least one pure strategy Nash equilibrium (NE)

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion