A Jamming-Resilient and Scalable Broadcasting Algorithm for Multiple Access Channel Networks

Abstract

Multiple access channel (MAC) networks use a broadcasting algorithm called the Binary Exponential Backoff (BEB) to mediate access to the shared communication channel by competing nodes and resolve their collisions. While the BEB achieves fair throughput and average packet latency in jamming-free environments and relatively small networks, its performance noticeably degrades when the network is exposed to jamming or its size increases. This paper presents an alternative broadcasting algorithm called the K-tuple Full Withholding (KTFW), which significantly increases MAC networks’ resilience to jamming attacks and network growth. Through simulation, we compare the KTFW with both the BEB and the Queue Backoff (QB), an efficient and high-throughput broadcasting algorithm. We compare the three approaches against two different traffic injection models, each approximating a different environment type. Our results show that the KTFW achieves higher throughput and lower average packet latency against jamming attacks than both the BEB and the QB algorithms. The results also show that the KTFW outperforms the BEB for larger networks with or without jamming.