Defend Jamming Attacks: How to Make Enemies Become Friends

In this paper, we consider a smart jammer that only attacks the channel if it detects activities of legitimate devices on that channel. To cope with such smart jamming attacks, we propose an intelligent deception strategy in which the legitimate transmitter sends fake transmissions to lure the jammer. Then, if the jammer launches attacks to the channel, the legitimate transmitter can either backscatter the jamming signals to transmit data or harvest energy from the jamming signals for future active transmissions. In this way, we can not only undermine the attack ability of the jammer, but also leverage jamming signals as means to enhance system performance. In addition, to find an optimal defense strategy for the legitimate device under uncertainty of wireless environment as well as incomplete information from the jammer, we develop Q-learning and deep Q-learning algorithms based on the Markov decision process. Through simulation results, we demonstrate that our proposed solution is able to not only deal with smart jamming attacks, but also successfully leverage jamming attacks to improve the system performance.