Reactive jammer piggybacking: Achieving antifragile electronic warfare

Jamming is an ongoing threat that plagues wireless communications in contested areas. Unfortunately, jamming complexity and sophistication will continue to increase over time. The traditional approach to addressing the jamming threat is to harden radios, such that they sacrifice communications performance for more advanced jamming protection. To provide an escape from this trend, we propose a jammer exploitation strategy in which the communications system causes an enemy reactive jammer to act as an unwitting relay. Jammer exploitation against an enemy can be considered a form of antifragile electronic warfare, a recently introduced area of research within wireless security. Antifragility refers to systems that increase in capability, resilience, or robustness as a result of disorder (e.g., chaos, uncertainty, stress). An antifragile system is fundamentally different from one that is resilient (i.e., able to recover from failure) and robust (i.e., able to resist failure). The antifragile strategy proposed in this paper revolves around using a frequency-shift keying (FSK) waveform that is tuned in such a way to exploit the jammer's behavior. We derive the channel capacity and cutoff rate when using the waveform, and provided numerical results via simulation to gain further insight. Results show that an antifragile gain is achievable under a variety of reactive jamming scenarios.