Bypassing a Reactive Jammer via NOMA-Based Transmissions in Critical Missions

Jamming attacks present a crucial threat to the quality of service in wireless networks, disrupting essential features including reliability, latency, and effective rate specifically in mission-critical applications. This paper introduces and evaluates a NOMA-based model to improve the robustness of wireless networks against jamming attacks. To investigate and address the consequences of a reactive jammer in this context, its effect on substantial network metrics such as reliability, average transmission delay, and the effective sum rate (ESR) under finite blocklength transmissions are mathematically computed, taking by considering the detection probability of the jammer. Furthermore, the effect of UEs' allocated power and blocklength on the network metrics is explored. Contrary to the existing literature, results show that gNB can mitigate the impact of reactive jamming by decreasing transmit power, making the transmissions covert at the jammer side. Finally, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the ESR under reliability, delay, and transmit power constraints. It is shown that by adjusting the allocated transmit power to UEs by gNB, the gNB can bypass the jammer effect to fulfill the 0.99999 reliability and the latency of 5ms without the need for packet re-transmission.