Exact and Efficient Protective Jamming in SINR-based Wireless Networks

A majority of research in communication in wireless networks is devoted to maximizing information flow, improving connectivity, or making the system robust against physical perturbations such as jamming. In this work we study how intentional jamming can be used for assuring privacy of wireless communication under the popular Signal-to-Interference-plus- Noise-Ratio (SINR) model. The considered problem, called Zone-restriction with Max-coverage, is as follows: how to place a number of jamming stations in order to generate interference that block the signal of given genuine stations in a specified restricted area, i.e., by making the SINR value of the genuine stations' signal below a pre-defined threshold in that area. In the construction of algorithms, we aim at optimizing both the accuracy - by minimizing the impact of the jamming stations to the area of genuine communication and by maximizing their influence to the area that should be jammed, as well as the energy consumption of the jamming stations. We present several solutions in various settings of the network, which often lead to challenging analysis even in relatively simple cases. Among others, we show that, surprisingly, it is possible to jam arbitrarily large areas by jammers using total energy arbitrarily close to zero.