Randomized Differential DSSS: Jamming-Resistant Wireless Broadcast Communication

Abstract

Abstract—Jamming resistance is crucial for applications where reliable wireless communication is required. Spread spectrum techniques such as Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) have been used as countermeasures against jamming attacks. Traditional antijamming techniques require that senders and receivers share a secret key in order to communicate with each other. However, such a requirement prevents these techniques from being effective for anti-jamming broadcast communication, where a jammer may learn the shared key from a compromised or malicious receiver and disrupt the reception at normal receivers. In this paper, we propose a Randomized Differential DSSS (RD-DSSS) scheme to achieve anti-jamming broadcast communication without shared keys. RD-DSSS encodes each bit of data using the correlation of unpredictable spreading codes. Specifically, bit “0 ” is encoded using two different spreading codes, which have low correlation with each other, while bit “1 ” is encoded using two identical spreading codes, which have high correlation. To defeat reactive jamming attacks, RD-DSSS uses multiple spreading code sequences to spread each message and rearranges the spread output before transmitting it. Our theoretical analysis and simulation results show that RD-DSSS can effectively defeat jamming attacks for anti-jamming broadcast communication without shared keys. I