Nash equilibrium for proactive anti-jamming in IEEE 802.15.4e (Emerging wireless sensor actuator technologies for I4.0)

An emerging trend in industry 4.0 is to use wireless communication infrastructure and mesh networks in applications requiring high reliability and safety. Although not a typical industrial production process, railway vehicular networks are also an industrial application which come with stringent reliability and safety requirements. Current research is focusing on using vehicular networks as an enabling technology to actively control the separation between two consecutive vehicles, enforcing a safe distance which is nevertheless much shorter than currently used to maintain vehicle separation. In this respect, we analyze a hopping strategy for Time-Slotted Channel-Hopping (TSCH), which was introduced in the IEEE 802.15.4e amendment with a view of improving the reliability of IEEE 802.15.4 networks. We define a probability framework to estimate the chance of successful hopping assuming two previously merged vehicles, and we design a zero-sum game and propose a payoff function to always place communicating nodes in a Nash equilibrium by choosing whether to hop or not, and therefore maximizing the communication throughput by mitigating jamming signals.