Equalization attacks against OFDM: analysis and countermeasures

This paper introduces, investigates, and proposes power-efficient equalization jamming attacks against the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing OFDM and possible countermeasures. Signals known a priori, called pilot tones, are employed in the conventional OFDM-based systems to estimate the channel response and perform equalization. Attacks against these pilot tones can hamper equalization and degrade target's performance. This paper begins with noise-based pilot tone jamming and moves onto pilot nulling attack. The paper embraces two mitigation strategies of randomizing the pilot tones. The paper presents mathematical model of effective noise per symbol and simulation results for OFDM systems with conventional and randomized pilot-tones under such attacks. The paper concludes that the noise-based pilot tone attacks are power efficient than conventional attacks, and the pilot nulling is capable of doing the most damage, but in the expense of additional channel state information. The paper also claims that the mitigation strategies offer a remedy, but works relatively poorly when no jammer is present. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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