Jamming/Anti-jamming Game with a Cognitive Jammer in Space Communication Xin Tian a , Zhi Tian b , Khanh Pham c , Erik Blasch d , Dan Shen a a Intelligent Fusion Technology, Inc, Gaithersburg, MD USA 20878 b ECE Dept., Michigan Technological University, 1400 Townsend Drive, Houghton, MI USA 49931 c Air Force Research Laboratory, Space Vehicles Directorate, Kirtland AFB, NM USA 87117 d Air Force Research Laboratory, Information Directorate, Rome, NY USA 13441 ABSTRACT In this paper a basic cognitive jamming/anti-jamming problem is studied in the context of space communication. The scenario involves a pair of transmitter and receiver, and a cognitive jammer. The cognitive jammer is assumed to have powerful spectrum sensing capability that allows it to detect data transmission from the transmitter to the receiver over the communication channels. Accordingly the jammer uses a “detect and jam” strategy; while the transmitter-receiver side uses the direct frequency hopping spread spectrum approach to mitigate the jamming impact. The basic jamming/anti-jamming problem is formulated as a two-side zero sum game between the jammer and the transmitter- receiver sides. For spectrum sensing, it is assumed that the jammer uses the energy detection in a sliding window fashion, namely, sliding window energy detection. As a conservative strategy of the transmitter-receiver side, Maxmin solutions to the jamming/anti-jamming game are obtained under various conditions. The impacts of factors such as signal propagation delay, channel bandwidth, and jammer/receiver side signal noise ratio on the game results are discussed. The results show the potential threats of cognitive jammers and provide important information for the configuration of jamming resistant space communication networks. Keywords: Space communication, Cognitive jammer, sliding window energy detection, Anti-jamming game 1. INTRODUCTION Wireless communication is vulnerable to jamming attacks of which mitigation strategies include Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS). Cognitive Radios (CRs) with the capability of sensing the spectrum environment were initially developed to allow unlicensed (secondary) users to identify and utilize opportunistic spectrum resources when they are not occupied by licensed users. The same CR technologies developed for spectrum sensing and allocation can be used by jammers for directing attacks to their targeted communication systems. Existing works in the literature assume that cognitive jammers have rather limited hardware resources and processing power, as a result, they can only conduct channel sensing in a sequential manner, i.e., only one communication channel can be sensed at a time [5-8]. In such scenarios, the major decision making of the jammers is focused on the determination of which channel or channels to sense or jam. In this work, we investigate cognitive jamming/anti-jamming game for space communication applications. Here it is assumed that the jammer has enough processing power and resources to simultaneously monitor communication channels in the operating spectrum range. The focus of the paper is to investigate the impact of the jammer’s response time (the time for the jammer to detect and react to data transmission from the transmitter to the receiver over a communication channel) on the behaviors of both sides of the jamming/anti-jamming game. To this end the concept of jammer reaction time is introduced, which accounts for the jammer’s detection time as well as the time difference in signal prorogation time over two different paths (transmitter-receiver and transmitter-jammer-receiver). For channel sensing, it is assumed that the jammer uses a sliding window energy detector (SWED) to constantly monitor the communication channels. Energy detection is a commonly used for spectrum sensing approach due to its simplicity and low requirements on information of the transmitter-receiver side [9]. In our previous work [10], the design and detection performance analysis of the SWED was presented, which account for the crosscorrelation of consecutive tests and yield the distribution of the detection time. The results will be used in this work for the solution of the cognitive jamming/anti-jamming game. In this paper the jamming/anti-jamming problem is formulated as a zero-sum game between the transmitter-receiver and the jammer. Both sides try to manipulate Sensors and Systems for Space Applications V, edited by Khanh D. Pham, Joseph L. Cox, Richard T. Howard, Henry Zmuda, Proc. of SPIE Vol. 8385, 83850Q · © 2012 SPIE CCC code: 0277-786X/12/$18 · doi: 10.1117/12.918798 Proc. of SPIE Vol. 8385 83850Q-1 Downloaded From: http://spiedigitallibrary.org/ on 11/26/2013 Terms of Use: http://spiedl.org/terms