Anti-Jamming Colonel Blotto Game for Underwater Acoustic Backscatter Communication

Underwater acoustic backscatter communication, which allows an underwater sensor node (USN) to communicate with the surface sink node (SN) by reflecting the acoustic signal from the SN, is a promising solution for enabling the Internet of Underwater Things. However, underwater backscattering is vulnerable to jamming attacks, especially from a gliding autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that can inject jamming signal to the underwater acoustic channel accordingly. This article considers the attack-defense interactions between the AUV jammer and the SN defender in their transmit power allocations of jamming signals and acoustic signals over multiple USNs. We formulate the strategic power allocation problem for the SN and AUV as an asymmetric anti-jamming Colonel Blotto (CB) game model with a finite budget of total transmit powers. In particular, the competitive interactions between the SN and the AUV is modeled as the competition of two players in the game for limited resource budgets over the battlefield set. We analyze the mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium to the game, and obtain the closed-form performance bound of the defense power allocation strategy. Numerical results show the superiority of the proposed CB game based multi-USN secure transmission scheme as compared to the benchmarks in terms of the expected sum-utility.