Impact of Jamming Attacks on Vehicular Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control Systems

Abstract

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is considered as a key enabling technology to automatically regulate the inter-vehicle distances in a vehicle string, and improve the traffic throughput efficiency. In the existing CACC systems, the coupling between wireless communication uncertainty, and system states is not well modeled. In this paper, we integrate the jamming attacks, and wireless channel fading effects into the CACC state space equations such that it effectively captures the coupling impact. Then, we propose a novel time domain approach to analyze the mean string stability (MSS) of such a model. Based on the proposed model, we analyze the impact of the jammer's location on the string stability. We derive a sufficient condition for the packet successful delivery probability which indicates that the jammer has a higher probability to destabilize the string when it is closer to the first vehicle following the lead vehicle. We also propose a methodology to compute the upper, and lower bounds of the inter-vehicle distance trajectories between the lead vehicle, and its follower. Furthermore, string safety is investigated by numerically estimating the collision probability across the string. We conduct comprehensive Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the stability, and safety of the string in various scenarios. We identify that string stability, and safety are highly influenced by the jamming attacks signal, and jammer's location. We show the consistency between the main results achieved by MSS analysis, and the Monte Carlo simulations.