Silence is Golden: Exploiting Jamming and Radio Silence to Communicate

Jamming techniques require only moderate resources to be deployed, while their effectiveness in disrupting communications is unprecedented. In this article, we introduce several contributions to jamming mitigation. In particular, we introduce a novel adversary model that has both (unlimited) jamming reactive capabilities as well as powerful (but limited) proactive jamming capabilities. Under this adversary model, to the best of our knowledge more powerful than any other adversary model addressed in the literature, the communication bandwidth provided by current anti-jamming solutions drops to zero. We then present Silence is Golden (SiG): a novel anti-jamming protocol that, introducing a tunable, asymmetric communication channel, is able to mitigate the adversary capabilities, enabling the parties to communicate. For instance, with SiG it is possible to deliver a 128-bits-long message with a probability greater than 99% in 4096 time slots despite the presence of a jammer that jams all on-the-fly communications and 74% of the silent radio spectrum—while competing proposals simply fail. Moreover, when SiG is used in a scenario in which the adversary can jam only a subset of all the available frequencies, performance experiences a boost: a 128-bits-long message is delivered within just 17 time slots for an adversary able to jam 90% of the available frequencies. We present a thorough theoretical analysis for the solution, which is supported by extensive simulation results, showing the viability of our proposal.