The timing channel is a logical communication channel in which information isencoded in the timing between events. Recently, the use of the timing channelhas been proposed as a countermeasure to reactive jamming attacks performed byan energy-constrained malicious node. In fact, whilst a jammer is able todisrupt the information contained in the attacked packets, timing informationcannot be jammed and, therefore, timing channels can be exploited to deliverinformation to the receiver even on a jammed channel. Since the nodes under attack and the jammer have conflicting interests, theirinteractions can be modeled by means of game theory. Accordingly, in this papera game-theoretic model of the interactions between nodes exploiting the timingchannel to achieve resilience to jamming attacks and a jammer is derived andanalyzed. More specifically, the Nash equilibrium is studied in the terms ofexistence, uniqueness, and convergence under best response dynamics.Furthermore, the case in which the communication nodes set their strategy andthe jammer reacts accordingly is modeled and analyzed as a Stackelberg game, byconsidering both perfect and imperfect knowledge of the jammer's utilityfunction. Extensive numerical results are presented, showing the impact ofnetwork parameters on the system performance.
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