Disrupting MIMO Communications With Optimal Jamming Signal Design

This paper considers the problem of intelligent jamming attack on a MIMO wireless communication link with a transmitter, a receiver, and an adversarial jammer, each equipped with multiple antennas. We present an optimal jamming signal design, which can maximally disrupt the MIMO transmission when the transceiver adopts an anti-jamming mechanism. In particular, signal-to-jamming-plus-noise ratio (SJNR) at the receiver is used as the anti-jamming reliability metric of the legitimate MIMO transmission. The jamming signal design is developed under the most crucial scenario for the jammer where the legitimate transceiver adopt jointly designed maximum-SJNR transmit beamforming and receive filter to suppress/mitigate the disturbance from the jammer. Under this best anti-jamming scheme, we aim to optimize the jamming signal to minimize the receiver's maximum-SJNR under a given jamming power budget. The optimal jamming signal designs are developed in different cases with accordance to the availability of channel state information (CSI) at the jammer. The analytical approximations of the jamming performance in terms of average maximum-SJNR are also provided. Extensive simulation studies confirm our analytical predictions and illustrate the efficiency of the designed optimal jamming signal on disrupting MIMO communications.