Adaptive rapid channel-hopping scheme mitigating smart jammer attacks in secure WLAN

As the military continues its transformation towards Network Centric Warfare, a quickly-deployable communication solution for a Tactical Operations Center is required. The U.S. Army uses Secure Wireless Local Area Network (SWLAN) with IEEE 802.11 standard waveforms to quickly set up Tactical Operations Center communications without cables. A SWLAN provides extremely secure mobile wireless data communication with COMSEC, TRANSEC, and monitoring systems to detect PHY and MAC layer misbehavior. However, the SWLAN cannot mitigate a smart jammer that transmits back-to-back packets on the detected channel after scanning all of the channels until a legitimate communication hops to a new channel. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive rapid channel-hopping scheme using Dwell Window and a Deception Mechanism to mitigate smart jammer attacks. The Dwell Window is a novel concept to adjust transmission time based on jammer´s capability. The Deception Mechanism is another novel concept to force the jammer to attack an inactive channel by deceiving the jammer. Numerical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme is more effective than prior studies.