A Jamming-Resistant Molecular Communication Scheme

Abstract

The sensitivity of many in vivo applications necessitates investigating adversarial activities in micro-scale MC systems. On the other hand, macro-scale applications of MC are easier to launch security attacks on. In this paper, we study the problem of jamming attacks in MC, where a concentration transmitter releases a particular type of molecule to send its message over a diffusive channel to a transparent receiver. A jammer wishes to disrupt the communication either by transmitting the same molecule type or a reacting molecule type. We propose jamming-resistant coding schemes to counteract this attack. For this purpose, three jamming models based on different capabilities of attackers and their possible strategies are introduced. The difference of jamming models relates to existence of sensing and learning capabilities. For two jammer types, our coding approaches are based on splitting each time slot into subslots, where a random pre-shared pattern is used to determine the transmit strategy in these subslots. The coding scheme against the third jammer type, which is the strongest one, is designed based on error correction codes with maximum Hamming distance. To analyse the performances of the proposed schemes, we derive the probability of error at the receiver. The results of the proposed schemes against the first and the second types of jammers confirm their effectiveness in protecting against jamming attacks. For example, in the specific case of the jammer channel and main channel discussed in the results section, we achieve an almost 78% reduction in the probability of errors at the receiver compared to a non-coded system when facing the first type of jammer. The third type of jammer represents the worst-case attack scenario, and its performance can be used as an upper bound for system performance.