Combined Interference and Communications Strategy as a Defense Mechanism in Cognitive Radio Military Networks

Abstract

Tactical wireless networks have different requirements and characteristics. Among these requirements, we can highlight physical layer security. An efficient way to increase the secrecy in wireless systems is to degrade the decoding capability of the eavesdroppers by introducing controlled interference or artificial noise. However, in tactical networks, there are situations in which the radio can not interfere, e.g. under severe power supply restrictions or if the enemy can detect radio position if it interferes. Moreover, there are also typical situations in which the radio does not need to interfere and therefore can save energy, e.g. transmission of low cruciality messages or radio usage in enemy-free areas. In this paper, we propose a Combined Interference and Communication strategy as defense against message interception in Cognitive Radio Military Networks. This strategy is grounded on interfering only under specific Cognitive Radio Military Networks requirements and characteristics. Numerical experiments show that we achieve a great energy saving in respect to [3] and [4] in several scenarios, reducing the receiver detection factor.