Jamming Attacks on FSO Networks: Challenges, Opportunities, and a Public Safety Use-Case

Among the candidate sixth-generation (6G) enabling technologies, free-space optical (FSO) technology has the potential to deliver high-performance thanks to its high throughput data links due to its unlicensed spectrum and wide bandwidth. However, FSO communication is adversely affected by fading caused by inherent channel anomalies. Along with these channel impairments, fabricated adversaries, such as jamming attacks, are also possible in FSO-based networks. Jammers threaten a security-constrained application, such as surveillance systems, to monitor critical areas where extra-trustworthy communication is required. This paper provides an overview of the vital issue of jamming attacks on FSO-based networks. It offers essential pointers to interested readers and future researchers on open research issues in this area. It also discusses the critical challenges related to existing security measures against jamming attacks in FSO-based networks. In addition, this paper presents a use-case scenario that evaluates the spectral efficiency performance of an FSO-based vehicular network under a jamming attack.