Jamming communication networks under complete uncertainty

Abstract

This paper describes a problem of interdicting/jamming wireless communication networks in uncertain environments. Jamming communication networks is an important problem with many applications, but has received relatively little attention in the literature. Most of the work on network interdiction is focused on preventing jamming and analyzing network vulnerabilities. Here, we consider the case where there is no information about the network to be jammed. Thus, the problem is reduced to jamming all points in the area of interest. The optimal solution will determine the locations of the minimum number of jamming devices required to suppress the network. We consider a subproblem which places jamming devices on the nodes of a uniform grid over the area of interest. The objective here is to determine the maximum grid step size. We derive upper and lower bounds for this problem and provide a convergence result. Further, we prove that due to the cumulative effect of the jamming devices, the proposed method produces better solutions than the classical technique of covering the region with uniform circles.