Anti-jamming Performance of Hybrid FEC code in the Presence of CRN Random Jammers

The survivability of Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) operating in the presence of malicious attackers, especially jammers is a crucial security issue. Cognitive Radio (CR) jammers are capable of taking advantage of the reconfigurable features of CRN so as to cause faults of different severity including value faults. The performance of CRNs under jamming attacks using the hybrid fault-model approach which considers different fault scenarios have been investigated. A hybrid Forward Error Correction (HFEC) code was proposed so as to mitigate the observed high jamming impact of CR jammers. The proposed HFEC code was defined as a concatenation of the Raptor code and the Secure Hash Algorithm-2 (SHA-2). The Raptor part is used to recover data loss due to jamming, while SHA-2 is used to verify the integrity of data received at the destination since CR jammers are capable of manipulating transmitted data leading to value faults. The HFEC code was designed in this manner so as to make it capable of handling all jamming scenarios identified under the hybrid fault model classification. In a previous paper, the performance of the HFEC code in a CRN operating in the presence of CR constant jammers was quantified. It was found that the HFEC code was robust against all instances of constant jammers, especially scenarios where value faults are introduced as a result of manipulated data. The need to investigate the performance of the HFEC in the presence of other jamming types like random jammers is imperative. This is because the random jammers behave significantly different from the constant jammers in their mode of operation. In this paper, we present the performance of the HFEC code in NS-2 extended for CRN. We essentially evaluate and analyze its performance against CR random jammers which are different from the constant jammers using relevant performance metrics. The observed high Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and recovery rate of the algorithm for all simulated scenarios show that the encoding and decoding algorithm of the proposed HFEC code is very efficient and resilient against the different rate of jamming of random jammers.