A Colonel Blotto Game for Anti-jamming in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned to be a large-scale system that interconnects sensors, mundane objects, and other physical devices via an effective communication infrastructure. Given the heterogeneous and large-scale nature of the IoT, security has emerged as a key challenge. This challenge is further exacerbated by the fact that security solutions for the IoT must account for the limited computational capabilities of the IoT's nodes. That makes enhancing the security at the physical layer level an attractive solution for IoT networks. In this paper, a novel anti-jamming mechanism is proposed to enable a fusion center to defend the IoT from a malicious radio jamming attack. The problem is formulated as a Colonel Blotto game in which the fusion center, acting as defender, aims to detect the jamming attack by increasing the number of bits allocated to certain nodes for reporting their measured interference level, while the jammer aims to disturb the network performance and still be undetected. To solve this game, an algorithm based on fictitious play is proposed to reach the equilibrium of the game. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism outperforms the mechanism of allocating the available bits in a random manner for two different cases of network architecture.