Smart Jamming Attacks in Wireless Networks During a Transmission Cycle: Stackelberg Game with Hierarchical Learning Solution

Due to the broadcast nature of the shared medium, wireless communications become more vulnerable to malicious attacks. In this paper, we tackle the problem of jamming in wireless network when the transmission of the jammer and the transmitter occur with a non-zero cost. We focus on a jammer who keeps track of the re-transmission attempts of the packet until it is dropped. Firstly, we consider a power control problem following a Nash Game model, where all players take action simultaneously. Secondly, we consider a Stackelberg Game model, in which the transmitter is the leader and the jammer is the follower. As the jammer has the ability to sense the transmission power, the transmitter adjusts its transmission power accordingly, knowing that the jammer will do so. We provide the closed-form expressions of the equilibrium strategies where both the transmitter and the jammer have a complete information. Thereafter, we consider a worst case scenario where the transmitter has an incomplete information while the jammer has a complete information. We introduce a Reinforcement Learning method, thus, the transmitter can act autonomously in a dynamic environment without knowing the above Game model. It turns out that despite the jammer ability of sensing the active channel, the transmitter can enhance its efficiency by predicting the jammer reaction according to its own strategy.