Game-Theoretical Analysis of PLC System Performance in the Presence of Jamming Attacks

In this paper, we investigate the performance of power line communication (PLC) network in the presence of jamming attacks. The legitimate nodes of the PLC network try to communicate with the anchor node of the network while the jamming node attempts to degrade the system performance. The fading, attenuation and colored noise of the PLC channel with dependence on the frequency and transmission distance are taken into account. To investigate the jamming problem, we frame the adversarial interaction into a Bayesian game, where the PLC network tries to maximize the overall expected network capacity and the jammer node has the opposite goal. In the Bayesian game, both players have imperfect knowledge of their opponents. We study effects of total power available to the players on the equilibrium of the game by formulating it into zero-sum and non-zero-sum games, respectively. It is found that under some network setup, there exists a threshold power for which the actual gameplay of the legitimate nodes does not depend upon the actions of the jamming node, and vice versa. This allows us to choose the appropriate power allocation schemes given the total power and the action of the jamming node in some cases.