Exploiting Subcarrier Agility to Alleviate Active Jamming Attacks in Wireless Networks

Malicious interference injection or jamming is one of the simplest ways to disrupt wireless communications. Prior approaches can alleviate jamming interference to a limited extent; they are especially vulnerable to a reactive jammer i.e., a jammer that injects noise upon sensing a legitimate transmission or wideband jamming. In this paper, we leverage the inherent features of OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) to cope with such attacks. Specifically, via extensive experiments, we observe that the jamming signal experiences differing levels of fading across the composite sub-carriers in its transmission bandwidth. Thus, if the legitimate transmitter were to somehow exploit the relatively unaffected sub-carriers to transmit data to the receiver, it could achieve reasonable throughputs, even in the presence of the active jammer. We design and implement JIMS, a Jamming Interference Mitigation Scheme that exploits the above characteristic by overcoming key practical challenges. Via extensive testbed experiments and simulations we show that JIMS achieves a throughput restoration of up to 75 percent in the presence of an active jammer.