LTE jamming mitigation based on frequency hopping strategies

LTE (Long-Term Evolution) has been successfully deployed worldwide and the respective standardization body, 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project), is committed to continuously evolve the technology and introduce new features applied to a variety of sectors, such as Network Operators, Industrial, Public Safety and National Defense. Considering this last sector, the existing features of Security and QoS (Quality of Service) are very useful when applied to the Defense industry, but cannot provide protection against intentional jamming attacks, which can interrupt OTA (Over-the-Air) communications. So far, there is no formal 3GPP report addressing the jamming issue, although mechanisms to mitigate OTA vulnerabilities have been proposed in the literature, mainly requiring changes in the LTE physical layer standard. This paper presents two innovative strategies to prevent jamming attacks, without changes in the 3GPP standard or in the base station and terminal hardware. These advantages can accelerate the deployment and reduce the costs by using the same infrastructure equipment. A computational simulation is performed in order to compare scenarios involving Cell Frequency Reconfiguration and Frequency Hopping Strategies. Performance results are shown considering video streaming service with different jamming scenarios.