An Intelligent Anti-Jamming Mechanism against Rule-based Jammer in Cognitive Radio Network

Abstract

Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) has become a promising technology to overcome the problem of insufficient spectrum utilization. However, the CRN is susceptible to the well-known jamming attack, which reduces its spectrum utilization efficiency. Existing jamming identification schemes and their countermeasure typically require prior statistical information about the communication channel and jamming pattern. This is quite an impractical assumption in the real context. The prime research problem is that the existing schemes are mainly associated with higher computational costs and communication overhead. Hence, the proposed manuscript presents a non-device-centric and efficient anti-jamming mechanism in the form of higher spectrum utilization driven by reinforcement learning techniques to address this above-stated problem. The proposed anti-jamming mechanism is modeled in two phases of implementation. First, the design of the customized environment is introduced as a single wideband cognitive-communication channel where a jammer signal sweeps transversely in the entire band of interest. Secondly, an intelligent agent is designed based on a model-free off-policy algorithm that operates over the same spectrum band. The agent uses its frequency-band knowledge discovery capability to learn frequency band selection and preference strategies to detect and avoid jamming signals, maximizing its successful transmission rate. The simulation results show that the proposed anti-jamming mechanism can effectively eliminate interference and is efficient in power usage and Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) compared to other existing advanced algorithms.