Antifragile Communications

This paper introduces the concept of antifragile communications, which we define as the capability for a communications system to improve in performance due to a system stressor or harsh condition. Antifragility refers to systems that increase in capability, resilience, or robustness as a result of mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. An antifragile system is fundamentally different from one that is resilient (able to recover from failure) and robust (able to resist failure). We apply the concept of antifragility to wireless communications where the system stressor is a jammer that intends to disrupt the underlying communications. Through a novel strategy, we exploit the communications jammer, providing an increase in communications capability such as bits per second. We show that an antifragile gain is possible under a wide variety of reactive jamming scenarios and provide guidelines for realizing these gains by creating an antifragile waveform.