Disguised jamming against OFDM transmission through nonlinear amplify-and-forward

Disguised jamming can be used to disrupt adversary wireless transmission without being noticed. In this paper, a novel nonlinear amplify-and-forward (NAF) jamming scheme is proposed to perform disguised jamming on wireless OFDM transmission, by exploiting the vulnerability of OFDM systems to nonlinear distortion. In the proposed design, the jammer nonlinearly amplifies captured signals and then forwards them to the receiver of the target communication system. Consequently, constellation rotation of the target communication signals, coupled with inter-carrier interference and additional noise, is imposed to the receiver. The OFDM transmission is thus disrupted. As the jamming signals are just a distorted version of the communication signals, which can also be induced by hardware imperfection of the communication system itself, the jamming attack is difficult to detect. Moreover, the proposed jamming scheme requires no information about the communication system and no synchronization to target signals. In addition, it can be easily implemented by analog circuits without any digital signal processing. Simulation results are provided to validate the proposed NAF jamming scheme.