Talk at KTH Royal Institute of Technology on "Jammer Mitigation in Multi-Antenna Systems"

Jamming attacks pose a perennial threat to wireless communication systems on which society increasingly depends. Multi-antenna systems offer the possibility of jammer mitigation through spatial filtering, e.g., by projecting the received signals onto the subspace orthogonal to the jammer’s channel. Significant challenges remain, however. The first challenge relates to RF hardware: Strong jamming signals can overload the analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and drown the useful signals in quantization noise. The resulting nonlinearities reduce the effectiveness of digital spatial filtering drastically. As a remedy, we propose hybrid architectures that attempt to pre-mitigate the jamming signal before the ADCs. Another challenge relates to smart jammers: Spatial filtering requires information about the jammer, e.g., in the form of its signal subspace or spatial covariance. In the case of simple barrage jammers, this information can be obtained using a “training interval” during which the jammer characteristics can be estimated. However, a smart jammer (i.e., a protocol-aware or a reactive jammer) might stop jamming during the training interval to evade estimation (and hence mitigation). A multi-antenna jammer might even modulate the subspace on which it is jamming by using time-varying beamforming. To mitigate such smart dynamic jammers, we propose a novel paradigm called JMD (Joint jammer Mitigation and data Detection) as well as a number of JMD-type jammer mitigation algorithms.

This is a joint work with Gian Marti, Oscar Castañeda, and Prof. Christoph Studer. You can attend this talk via external page Zoom.

More details about the talk external page here.