Packet Scheduling over a Wireless Channel: AQT-based Constrained Jamming

Abstract

In this paper we consider a two-node setting with a sender transmitting packets to a receiver over a wireless channel. Unfortunately, the channel can be jammed, thus corrupting the packet that is being transmitted at the time. The sender has a specific amount of data that needs to be sent to the receiver and its objective is to complete the transmission of the data as quickly as possible in the presence of jamming. We assume that the jamming is controlled by a constrained adversary. In particular, the adversary’s power is constrained by two parameters, $\rho$ and $\sigma$. Intuitively, $\rho$ represents the rate at which the adversary can jam the channel, and $\sigma$ the length of the largest bursts of jams it can cause. This definition corresponds to the translation of the Adversarial Queuing Theory (AQT) constrains, typically defined for packet injections in similar settings, to channel jamming. We propose deterministic scheduling algorithms that decide the lengths of the packets to be sent by the sender in order to minimize the transmission time. We first assume all packets being of the same length (uniform) and characterize the corresponding optimal packet length. Then, we show that if the packet length can be adapted, for specific values of $\rho$ and $\sigma$ the transmission time can be improved.