Jamming Bandits—A Novel Learning Method for Optimal Jamming

Can an intelligent jammer learn and adapt to unknown environments in an electronic warfare-type scenario? In this paper, we answer this question in the positive, by developing a cognitive jammer that adaptively and optimally disrupts the communication between a victim transmitter-receiver pair. We formalize the problem using a multiarmed bandit framework where the jammer can choose various physical layer parameters such as the signaling scheme, power level and the on-off/pulsing duration in an attempt to obtain power efficient jamming strategies. We first present online learning algorithms to maximize the jamming efficacy against static transmitter-receiver pairs and prove that these algorithms converge to the optimal (in terms of the error rate inflicted at the victim and the energy used) jamming strategy. Even more importantly, we prove that the rate of convergence to the optimal jamming strategy is sublinear, i.e., the learning is fast in comparison to existing reinforcement learning algorithms, which is particularly important in dynamically changing wireless environments. Also, we characterize the performance of the proposed bandit-based learning algorithm against multiple static and adaptive transmitter-receiver pairs.