Silence is Golden: exploiting jamming and radio silence to communicate

Jamming techniques require just moderate resources to be deployed, while their effectiveness in disrupting communications is unprecedented. In this paper, we introduce several contributions to jamming mitigation. In particular, we introduce a novel adversary model that has both (unlimited) jamming reactive capabilities as well as powerful (but limited) proactive jamming capabilities. Under this adversary model, that to the best of our knowledge is more powerful than any other adversary model addressed in the literature, the communication bandwidth provided by current anti-jamming solutions drops to zero. We then present Silence is Golden (SiG): a novel anti jamming protocol that, introducing a tunable, asymmetric communication channel, is able to mitigate the adversary capabilities, enabling the parties to communicate. For instance, with SiG it is possible to deliver a 128 bits long message with a probability greater than 99% in 4096 time slots despite the presence of a jammer that jams both all on-the-fly communications and the 74% of the silent radio spectrum while competing proposals simply fail. Moreover, when SiG is used in a scenario where the adversary can jam just a subset of all the available frequencies, performance experiences a boost: a 128 bits long message is delivered within just 17 time slots for an adversary able to jam the 90% of the available frequencies. The provided solution enjoys a thorough theoretical analysis and is supported by extensive simulation results, showing the viability of our proposal.