Universal MIMO Jammer Mitigation via Secret Temporal Subspace Embeddings

Abstract: MIMO processing enables jammer mitigation through spatial filtering, provided that the receiver knows the spatial signature of the jammer interference. Estimating this signature is easy for barrage jammers that transmit continuously and with static signature, but difficult for more sophisticated jammers: Smart jammers may deliberately suspend transmission when the receiver tries to estimate their spatial signature, they may use time-varying beamforming to continuously change their spatial signature, or they may stay mostly silent and jam only specific instants (e.g., transmission of control signals). To deal with such smart jammers, we propose MASH, the first method that indiscriminately mitigates all types of jammers: Assume that the transmitter and receiver share a common secret. Based on this secret, the transmitter embeds (with a linear time-domain transform) its signal in a secret subspace of a higher-dimensional space. The receiver applies a reciprocal linear transform to the receive signal, which (i) raises the legitimate transmit signal from its secret subspace and (ii) provably transforms any jammer into a barrage jammer, which makes estimation and mitigation via MIMO processing straightforward. We show the efficacy of MASH for data transmission in the massive multi-user MIMO uplink.