A real-time and protocol-aware reactive jamming framework built on software-defined radios

Abstract

This paper develops a software-defined radio (SDR) framework for real-time reactive adversarial jamming in wireless networks. The system consists of detection and RF response infrastructure, implemented in the FPGA of a USRP N210 and designed to function with the open source GNU Radio SDR library. The framework can be used to implement a fast turnaround reactive jamming system capable of timely RF response within \textit{80ns} of signal detection. Our framework also allows for full control and feedback from the FPGA hardware to the GNU Radio-based cognitive radio backend, making it applicable to a wide range of preamble-based wireless communication schemes. This paper presents the capabilities, design, and experimental evaluation of this framework. Using this platform, we demonstrate real-time reactive jamming capabilities in both WiFi (802.11g) and mobile WiMAX (802.16e) networks and quantify jamming performances by measuring the network throughput using the iperf software tool. The results indicate that our system works reliably in real time as a reactive jammer and can be used for practical assessments of modern jamming and secure communication techniques. © 2014 ACM.