Jamming-aware minimum energy routing in wireless networks

Abstract

The effectiveness and straightforward implementation of physical layer jammers make them an essential security threat for wireless networks. In this paper, reliable communication in a wireless multi-hop network in the presence of multiple malicious jammers is considered. Since energy consumption is an important issue in wireless ad hoc networks, minimum energy routing with and without security constraints has received significant attention in the literature; however, energy-aware routing in the presence of active adversary (jammers) has not been considered. We propose an efficient algorithm for minimum energy routing between a source and a destination in the presence of both static and dynamic malicious jammers such that an end-to-end probability of outage is guaranteed. The percentage of energy saved by the proposed method with respect to a shortest path routing benchmark is evaluated. It is shown that the amount of energy saved, especially in terrestrial wireless networks with path-loss exponents greater than two, is substantial.