Limitations of Quorum-based Rendezvous and key establishment schemes against sophisticated jamming attacks

Recently Quorum-based frequency hopping schemes have been studied to increase rendezvous probabilities and to provide fast key establishment techniques in RF communication under jamming attacks. However, these schemes are still vulnerable to sophisticated jamming attacks in which a jammer has the capability of listening and jamming multiple frequencies. In this paper, we present a sophisticated jamming attack and evaluate its effectiveness on Frequency Quorum-based Rendezvous (FQR) schemes [4]. The sophisticated jammer can find the sender´s quorum set within the second frame (i.e., 2fc time slots) in the FQR system when it has the capability of listening on k frequencies from the minimal (N, k) difference sets. The jammer can completely jam the sender after 2fc time slots using an average of ⌊k+1/2⌋ and a maximum of k frequencies. To remedy this jamming problem, we revisit the role-based rendezvous scheme and extend it to the Role-based Frequency Rendezvous (RFR) scheme. Our simulation results demonstrate that the rendezvous probability of the FQR system under the sophisticated jamming attack dramatically decreased as the number of available channel N increases (e.g., ≤ 35% for N ≥ 30 in k² time slots). On the other hand, the rendezvous probability of our RFR scheme is almost steady for all available frequencies N (e.g., ≥ 90% for N ≥ 20). Therefore, the RFR scheme can be an effective, efficient and robust rendezvous and key establishment scheme against sophisticated jamming attacks.