Defeating Jamming With the Power of Silence: A Game-Theoretic Analysis

The timing channel is a logical communication channel in which information is encoded in the timing between events. Recently, the use of the timing channel has been proposed as a countermeasure to reactive jamming attacks performed by an energy-constrained malicious node. In fact, while a jammer is able to disrupt the information contained in the attacked packets, timing information cannot be jammed, and therefore, timing channels can be exploited to deliver information to the receiver even on a jammed channel. Since the nodes under attack and the jammer have conflicting interests, their interactions can be modeled by means of game theory. Accordingly, in this paper, a game-theoretic model of the interactions between nodes exploiting the timing channel to achieve resilience to jamming attacks and a jammer is derived and analyzed. More specifically, the Nash equilibrium is studied in terms of existence, uniqueness, and convergence under best response dynamics. Furthermore, the case in which the communication nodes set their strategy and the jammer reacts accordingly is modeled and analyzed as a Stackelberg game, by considering both perfect and imperfect knowledge of the jammer´s utility function. Extensive numerical results are presented, showing the impact of network parameters on the system performance.