A Game Theoretic Approach to Modelling Jamming Attacks in Delay Tolerant Networks

The delay-tolerant-network (DTN) model is becoming a viable communication alternative to the traditional infrastructure model for military, terrestrial and atypical networks, which are characterised by transmission delay and intermittent network connections. The possibility of limited connectivity and resource scarcity in DTNs make them vulnerable to various cyber-attacks, including interference attacks such as jamming. We study the defence against jamming attacks in a delay tolerant network with two adversarial players the jammer, and the transmitterreceiver pair in a game theoretic environment. The transmitters seek to choose an optimal time to schedule the transmission securely to maximise the probability of successful delivery before the session expires, while signal interferences from the jammer attempts to minimise this probability. We design strategies for the transmitters that offset transmission period based inference of network traffic by the jammer. We deduce a solution for this game, using a probability distribution function over finite number of strategies for both the players to compute their expected payoff. Using a simulation test-bed, we create several scenarios in which the players are considered to have perfect/imperfect information and compute the expected payoff and resulting equilibrium values. The cases of perfect /imperfect information of the players are further studied using entropy based measures. These results are used to strategically evaluate the optimal time for the players, and assess the efficiency of the strategies used by the transmitters against jammer attacks.