Adversarial Jamming and Catching Games over AWGN Channels with Mobile Players

Abstract

We study a wireless jamming problem consisting of the competition between a legitimate receiver and a jammer, as a zero-sum game with the value to maximize/minimize being the channel capacity at the receiver's side. Most of the approaches found in the literature consider the two players to be stationary nodes. Instead, we investigate what happens when they can change location, specifically moving along a linear geometry. We frame this at first as a static game, which can be solved in closed form, and subsequently we extend it to a dynamic game, under three different versions for what concerns completeness/perfection of mutual information about the adversary's position, corresponding to different assumptions of concealment/sequentiality of the moves, respectively. We first provide some theoretical conditions that hold for the static game and also help identify good strategies valid under any setup, including dynamic games. Since dynamic games, although more realistic, are characterized by an exploding strategy space, we exploit reinforcement learning to obtain efficient strategies leading to equilibrium outcomes. We show how theoretical findings can be used to train smart agents to play the game, and validate our approach in practical setups.

It Is Rude to Ask a Sensor Its Age-of-Information: Status Updates Against an Eavesdropping Node

“…Envisioned extensions of the present paper include the analysis of an optimized schedule with stateful information [5], also investigating the costs for tracking the eavesdropper and detecting whether data was actually captured. Moreover, a natural follow-up would be to consider the analysis of this adversarial setup from a game theoretic standpoint [30], with an eavesdropper that is able to strategically regulate the data capture probability. Finally, an extension to pervasive data networks, especially for what concerns the scalability of the analysis, is key to bring the present investigation in the context of future generation communication systems [31].…”

Blockage-Peeking Game of Mobile Strategic Nodes in Millimeter Wave Communications

“…In particular, we point out that in our problem, the legitimate transmitter is fully informed that the adversary is present and trying to obstruct the communication, but the countermove to this can only be to peek around the obstruction. Clearly, catching games can also be analyzed (as we did in [18]) but they would be inherently different from the one under analysis here. Another direction out of the scope of the present paper, but certainly possible as a future extension, would be a scenario with incomplete information about the possible but not certain presence of a malicious obstacle, where, beyond finding a good path to the destination, the legitimate transmitter can also be interested in performing adversarial detection as well [37].…”

“…First of all, mmWave communications can provide high data rates, but when the positions of the users vary, the channel tends to change significantly, depending on whether a line-of-sight (LoS) exists between the transmitter and the receiver [15]- [17]. At the same time, moving away from a source of noise or changing location to avoid channel fades is a quite natural behavior adopted by real receivers, even those acting without any pretence of optimality [18], [19]; thus, in a game theoretic context, it can be considered as available to a rational player [20]. Finally, we point out that, in mmWave communications, we do not require an advanced adversary to undertake elaborate actions, we can focus on the case where it is merely placing an obstacle to cause blockage to the receiver, which in turn tries to evade it [21].…”