Anti-Jamming Schedules for Wireless Data Broadcast Systems

Abstract

Modern society is heavily dependent on wireless networks for providing voice and data communications. Wireless data broadcast has recently emerged as an attractive way to disseminate dynamic data to a large number of clients. In data broadcast systems, the server proactively transmits the information on a downlink channel; the clients access the data by listening to the channel. Wireless data broadcast systems can serve a large number of heterogeneous clients, minimizing power consumption as well as protecting the privacy of the clients' locations. The availability and relatively low cost of antennas resulted in a number of potential threats to the integrity of the wireless infrastructure. In particular, the data broadcast systems are vulnerable to jamming, i.e., the use of active signals to prevent data broadcast. The goal of jammers is to cause disruption, resulting in long waiting times and excessive power consumption. In this paper we investigate efficient schedules for wireless data broadcast that perform well in the presence of a jammer. We show that the waiting time of client can be reduced by adding redundancy to the schedule and establish upper and lower bounds on the achievable minimum waiting time under different requirements on the staleness of the transmitted data.

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