Asynchronous Channel-Hopping Scheme under Jamming Attacks

Abstract

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) are considered an attractive technology to mitigate inefficiency in the usage of licensed spectrum. CRNs allow the secondary users (SUs) to access the unused licensed spectrum and use a blind rendezvous process to establish communication links between SUs. In particular, quorum-based channel-hopping (CH) schemes have been studied recently to provide guaranteed blind rendezvous in decentralized CRNs without using global time synchronization. However, these schemes remain vulnerable to jamming attacks. In this paper, we first analyze the limitations of quorum-based rendezvous schemes called asynchronous channel hopping (ACH). Then, we introduce a novel sequence sensing jamming attack (SSJA) model in which a sophisticated jammer can dramatically reduce the rendezvous success rates of ACH schemes. In addition, we propose a fast and robust asynchronous rendezvous scheme (FRARS) that can significantly enhance robustness under jamming attacks. Our numerical results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed scheme vastly outperforms the ACH scheme when there are security concerns about a sequence sensing jammer.