Mitigating Rate-Aware Jamming Attacks: A Deceptive Anti-Jamming Approach with Enhanced Utility

Traditional anti-jamming strategies, such as frequency hopping and spread spectrum techniques, are insufficient in protecting the cognitive radio system from adaptive and intelligent jammers. To address this challenge, this article proposes a novel approach to anti-jamming based on deception techniques, which involves using a game-theoretic, pseudo-secondary user-based decoy to lure the jammer and deceive them into attacking a non-critical part of the network. In the proposed game-theoretic framework, the jammer's optimal strategy is to attack the decoy, while the network operator's optimal strategy is to protect the critical part of the network. By using a lure, the network operator can trick the jammer and achieve a Nash equilibrium where the jammer attacks the decoy, thereby protecting the communication system. Simulation results show that the proposed technique can improve the security of the communication system by increasing bandwidth efficiency, and decreasing the probability of a successful jamming attack.