Distributed jammer performance in Rayleigh fading

A distributed jammer is a set of small jamming transmitters distributed over a region to disrupt tactical communications. Propagation losses experienced by terrestrial jammers will be comparable to losses seen by the target radio links, with multipath fading, and power failing off faster than 1/r/sup 2/. An intelligent distributed jammer can partly overcome excess propagation loss by exploiting the proximity and small number of targets in each node's coverage region to extract information needed for frequency following or synchronized pulsed jamming. The coverage radius of an individual jammer node is an important system parameter, determining the number of nodes required. and the resulting jammer cost. A set of equations are presented that give the probability of jamming a target receiver randomly located inside a fixed range, when both communications and jamming signals suffer from Rayleigh fading. and average jammer power falls off faster than line-of-sight power. An upper bound on jammer performance improvement with intelligent jamming is found by assuming the nodes are able to extract desired target signal information. and calculating the improvement in jammer reliability with a fixed coverage range. Both frequency followers and synchronized pulsed jammers are examined. Performance improvement is greatest when each node's coverage region contains a limited number of distinct communications sub-networks.