Performance Analysis of Reactive Symbol-Level Jamming Techniques

The reactive symbol-level jamming (SLJ) technique is a simple but practical technique to disable or disrupt malicious communication links. After sensing the transmission and detecting the digital modulation scheme of the malicious transmitter, a communication node with the reactive SLJ technique, called a reactive jammer, generates random digital modulation symbols and then sends them to the malicious receiver. In this correspondence, we mathematically analyze both uncoded and coded bit error rate (BER) at the malicious receiver under not only reactive SLJ, but also Gaussian SLJ techniques. In particular, we consider the partial jamming scenario, in which a portion of symbols in a data frame are affected by the SLJ, which is a practical scenario under the reactive jamming techniques. We also consider the effect of imperfect power control and channel estimation error of the reactive jammer on the BER performance at the malicious receiver.