Of malicious motes and suspicious sensors: On the efficiency of malicious interference in wireless networks

How efficiently can a malicious device disrupt communication in a wireless network? Imagine a basic game involving two honest players, Alice and Bob, who want to exchange information, and an adversary, Collin, who can disrupt communication using a limited budget of β broadcasts. How long can Collin delay Alice and Bob from communicating? In fact, the trials and tribulations of Alice and Bob capture the fundamental difficulty shared by several n-player problems, including reliable broadcast, leader election, static k-selection, and t-resilient consensus. We provide round complexity lower bounds-and (nearly) tight upper bounds- for each of those problems. These results imply bounds on adversarial efficiency, which we analyze in terms of jamming gain and disruption-free complexity.