A Virtual MIMO based Anti-Jamming Strategy for Cognitive Radio Networks

The Common Control Channel (CCC) is foreseen to be adopted to establish and maintain network connections for users in future Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs). However, the jamming attack can be easily launched to interfere with the CCC of CRNs, and causes the deny-of-service of CRNs. Most of existing anti-jamming approaches are based on the frequency hopping principle with insufficient jamming resilience performance. MIMO based anti-jamming algorithms are effective to improve the jamming resilience performance. However, they are not applicable for the low power cognitive radio networks wherein the user devices are equipped with single antenna, such as cognitive radio sensor network. Observing that relaying strategy will be widely adopted for future CRN systems, we propose a Virtual Multiple Input Multiple Output (VMIMO) based anti-jamming strategy assisted by relay nodes, which proactively mitigates the interference caused by the jamming signal. Simulations show that the bit error rate (BER) of our proposed strategy is at least 10 times lower than that of frequency hopping based approaches.