Jammer-Resilient Time Synchronization in the MIMO Uplink

2024-04-08

arXiv.org

AI Summary

Time synchronization failure in MIMO uplink systems under intelligent jamming severely degrades communication reliability, yet existing schemes assume ideal synchronization—a fundamental limitation in adversarial environments. Method: This paper proposes JASS, the first anti-jamming single-user MIMO time synchronization method. JASS jointly optimizes spatial filtering and time-windowed received signals, formulating a novel synchronization criterion supported by theoretical success conditions. It achieves robust implementation via randomized synchronization sequence detection, spatio-temporal joint modeling, and an efficient approximate optimization algorithm. Contribution/Results: Simulation results demonstrate that JASS exhibits strong robustness against diverse intelligent jammers, significantly improving synchronization reliability. Crucially, it eliminates the dependency on pre-established perfect timing—overcoming a key constraint of prior approaches—and establishes a new paradigm for anti-jamming wireless communications.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Intelligent Robots: Multi-Robot Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Security and Privacy: Tracking, profiling, and countermeasures against them
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications

Abstract

Spatial filtering based on multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) processing is a promising approach to jammer mitigation. Effective MIMO data detectors that mitigate smart jammers have recently been proposed, but they all assume perfect time synchronization between transmitter(s) and receiver. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no methods for resilient time synchronization in the presence of smart jammers. To remedy this situation, we propose JASS, the first method that enables reliable time synchronization for the single-user MIMO uplink while mitigating smart jamming attacks. JASS detects a randomized synchronization sequence based on a novel optimization problem that fits a spatial filter to the time-windowed receive signal in order to mitigate the jammer. We underscore the efficacy of the proposed optimization problem by proving that it ensures successful time synchronization under certain intuitive conditions. We then derive an efficient algorithm for approximately solving our optimization problem. Finally, we use simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of JASS against a wide range of different jammer types.

Problem

• MIMO
• time synchronization
• jamming resistance

Innovation

• JASS
• MIMO systems
• synchronization under interference