The Resilience of MIMO Based Physical Layer Network Coding to Jamming Attack

In this paper, we explore the resilience of Physical Layer Network Coding (PNC) to jamming attacks, focusing on the bit error rate (BER) performance metric. The broadcast nature of the wireless medium has undoubtedly propelled some significant innovations, allowing ubiquitous access to broadband services. In spite of this, it has also created an enormous challenge in mitigating unfriendly interference, where jamming is categorized. A MIMO-PNC based algorithm shows significant improvement in error performance in the lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), where the base station (BS) applies linear detection, based on a linear transformed channel matrix, to received symbols, in order to estimate the network coded symbols. We investigate this algorithm in a centralized system of multi-antenna BS with multi-antenna legitimate users, against a barraging attack from a jammer, where the jamming channel is not known to the BS, and the jammer can use any number of transmit antennas. Over Rayleigh fading channels, our simulation results reveal that MIMO-based PNC perform better in lower SNR to jamming attack, as opposed to the non-jammed MIMO system, at twice the spectral efficiency.