Optimal Placement and Power Allocation for Jammers in Wireless Mesh Networks

A novel physical-layer based security method that utilizes jammers to generate additional interference for devices that are eavesdropping on wireless network communication is proposed. The scheme involves the intelligent placement of continuous jammers in order to achieve maximum protection and data confidentiality for wireless mesh networks with multiple eavesdroppers, sources and destinations. Furthermore, the scheme is optimized in terms of the transmitting power associated with each jammer so that the energy expended by the jammers is kept at a minimum. The protection scheme precludes the use of any cryptographic techniques and is only physical layer based. The security method is modeled as a minimization mixed integer non-linear problem and is approximated as the sequential solution of two linear optimization sub-problems relating to the placement and power allocation of the wireless jammers. The placement of the jammers takes the form of a multiple demand multidimensional knapsack problem with a minimization objective. The power allocation problem is modeled as a linear real-valued minimization optimization problem. The performance of the proposed security method is evaluated through appropriate simulations conducted on random network instances.