A Jamming Resistant Molecular Communication Scheme

Abstract

The importance of molecular communication (MC) security, due to its sensitive in vivo applications necessitates investigating adversarial activities in MC systems. In this paper, we study the problem of jamming attacks in MC. In our model, a biological/engineered concentration transmitter releases a particular type of molecule to send its message over a diffusive channel to a transparent receiver. However, the jammer tries to disrupt regular communication and prevent the receiver from receiving a reliable message either by transmitting the same molecule type or a molecule type able to react with the date carrier molecule. We propose a jamming-resistant coding scheme to counteract this attack. Our approach is based on splitting each symbol’s time slot into subslots where a random pre-shared pattern is used to determine the transmit strategy in these subslots. Two decision rules at the decoder are characterized and a sub-optimal threshold is computed for them. To analyse the performance of the proposed scheme, we derive the probability of error at the receiver. As the jammer can choose different types of molecules in each subslots according to its strategy, an optimal jamming strategy that maximizes the error probability of the message is derived numerically. The numerical results for the proposed scheme confirm the effectiveness of the scheme in protecting against jamming attacks.