Anti-Jamming Communication Game for UAV-Aided VANETs

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are vulnerable to jamming attacks, and frequency hopping-based anti- jamming techniques are not always applicable in VANETs due to the high mobility of the onboard units (OBUs) especially under a large scale network topology. In this paper, we use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to deal with VANET jamming, especially smart jamming that changes the jamming policy based on the ongoing communication status of the VANET. More specifically, the UAV relays the data of OBUs to another roadside unit (RSU) with a better transmission condition if the serving RSU is located in a heavily jammed area. The interactions between the UAV and the jammer are formulated as an anti-jamming UAV relay game, in which the UAV decides whether or not to relay the data of the OBU to another RSU that is far away from the jammer, and the latter chooses the jamming power. The Nash equilibria (NE) of the game are derived to reveal how the best UAV relay strategy depends on the transmission cost and the radio channel model. A hotbooting policy hill climbing (PHC)-based UAV relay strategy is proposed to address jamming in the dynamic UAV-aided VANET game without the knowledge of network model and jamming model. Simulation results show that the proposed relay strategy can efficiently reduce the bit error rate (BER) of OBU data and thus increase the utility of VANET in comparison with a Q-learning based scheme.