Optimal jamming strategies in digital communications — Impact of modulation

Abstract

Jamming attacks can significantly impact the performance of wireless communication systems, and can lead to significant overhead in terms of re-transmissions and increased power consumption. This paper considers the problem of optimal jamming over an additive white Gaussian noise channel. We derive the optimal jamming signal for various digital amplitude-phase modulated constellations. We show that it is not always optimal to match the jammer's signal to the victim signal in order to maximize the error probability at the victim receiver. Connections between the optimum jammer obtained in this analysis and the well-known pulsed jammer, popularly analyzed in the context of spread spectrum communication systems are illustrated. Further, we evaluate the value of the knowledge of the victim's modulation schemes by comparing the performance of the optimal jamming signals with conventional additive white Gaussian noise jamming. Numerical results are presented in order to validate the theoretical inferences presented.