Deadline Constrained Packet Scheduling in the Presence of an Energy Harvesting Jammer

Abstract

Maintaining data communication in the presence of jammer nodes is an important feature required in several modern wireless networks. In this article, we analyze a three node system, where a legitimate link between the transmitter and the receiver is adversarially affected by independent Gaussian noise injected by a jammer. The transmitter is battery powered, and has data arriving as packets. All the data need to be delivered to the receiver before a common deadline. The transmitter’s goal is to accomplish this task using as minimum an energy as possible, while the jammer’s objective is the opposite, viz. increase the transmitter’s energy as much as possible by strategically injecting noise. We consider a jammer node which relies on dynamic energy harvesting sources to power its hardware. The adversarial interactions are modeled by posing a min-max game between the transmitter and the jammer. Solving this, we derive the equilibrium scheduling policies of the transmitter and the jammer for the offline model, and present an iterative algorithm to compute these policies. Competitive online scheduling policies are then proposed, whose competitive ratio is bounded using ideas from the offline policies derived earlier. A constant competitive ratio is shown when the last data packet does not arrive too early, and a significant fraction of the jamming energy is harvested before this arrival.