Self-jamming: Who wins? An implementation study

Physical layer security is one possible alternative for the exploding Internet of Things in the coming years. We advance the state of art in physical layer security by implementing self-jamming on ultra low power transceivers without the assistance of “friendly” nodes. The implementation supports flexible payload sizes; where the simplest implementation carries a full data payload. We consider a passive eavesdropper with varying attack potentials; constantly attempting to recover the original data from the transmitter. We show that a 3dB shift and transmit power control between transmitter and receiver is good enough to ensure data security. The key insights from this work is that large payloads have a 50% lower throughput compared to smaller payloads. Also smaller payloads have the advantage of a 25% delay performance improvement over large payloads.