On the Achievable Rate in a D2D Cognitive Secondary Network Under Jamming Attacks

Ongoing developments of the LTE standard will allow for device-to-device (D2D) communications, which will enable direct connection of user equipments (UEs). Since UEs are becoming increasingly more powerful both in computational power and in the role they have in the network, a concrete threat is that a hand-held D2D-enabled device could be deployed to jam intentionally ongoing transmissions of other D2D users. In this context, a natural concern for operators will be the resilience of the legitimate user (LU) against a jammer's (J) attack. In this work, we model an LTE D2D system made of a pair of LUs and a J that tries to impair their communication. We model the adversarial scenario between the transmitting LU and J as a zero-sum game: in this game, J's target is to minimize the throughput of the legitimate D2D pair. We show the achievable channel rate of the D2D pair under jamming attacks and the existence of a Nash equilibrium. Finally, when both players learn each other strategy over time, e.g., employing fictitious play, such equilibrium becomes the system's operating point.