Enhancing Resilience Against Jamming Attacks: A Cooperative Anti-Jamming Method Using Direction Estimation

Abstract: The inherent vulnerability of wireless communication necessitates strategies to enhance its security, particularly in the face of jamming attacks. This paper uses the collaborations of multiple sensing nodes (SNs) in the wireless network to present a cooperative anti-jamming approach (CAJ) designed to neutralize the impact of jamming attacks. We propose an eigenvector (EV) method to estimate the direction of the channel vector from pilot symbols. Through our analysis, we demonstrate that with an adequate number of pilot symbols, the performance of the proposed EV method is comparable to the scenario where the perfect channel state information (CSI) is utilized. Both analytical formulas and simulations illustrate the excellent performance of the proposed EV-CAJ under strong jamming signals. Considering severe jamming, the proposed EV-CAJ method exhibits only a 0.7 dB degradation compared to the case without jamming especially when the number of SNs is significantly larger than the number of jamming nodes (JNs). Moreover, the extension of the proposed method can handle multiple jammers at the expense of degrees of freedom (DoF). We also investigate the method's ability to remain robust in fast-fading channels with different coherence times. Our proposed approach demonstrates good resilience, particularly when the ratio of the channel's coherence time to the time frame is small. This is especially important in the case of mobile jammers with large Doppler shifts.