Performance impact of asynchronous off-tone jamming attacks against OFDM

Abstract

This paper presents power efficient asynchronous off-tone jamming attacks on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). Often wireless communication systems have to operate in environments, which are prone to unknown interference from adversaries such as jamming, which can lead to degradation of performance. This paper begins with presenting existing conventional jamming attacks, such as barrage jamming (BJ), partial band jamming (PBJ), single-tone jamming (STJ), and multi-tone jamming (MTJ) on OFDM and then proposes new power efficient jamming strategies. It is known that signal with frequency offset can affect more spectrum than the occupied bandwidth as the signal energy gets smeared into adjacent spectrum while performing FFT in the OFDM receiver, and thus create inter-channel interference (ICI). This paper builds on this idea, and presents new asynchronous single off-tone and multiple off-tone jamming attacks on OFDM. We first present our channel model, and then undertake an analysis of OFDM systems under off-tone jamming attacks, verifying the idea through simulation. Both analysis and simulation show that off-tone jamming attacks have more adverse effect than jammer aligned with the received signal.