Control Channel Anti-Jamming in Vehicular Networks via Cooperative Relay Beamforming

In vehicular networks, radio-frequency (RF) jamming attacks are considered a major threat to the availability of control channel (CCH). In particular, vehicles may not be able to receive control messages from roadside units (RSUs) due to persistent interference in the CCH, which may claim human lives and result in significant economic losses. In this article, a cooperative anti-jamming beamforming scheme is proposed to address the CCH jamming problems in vehicular networks. This scheme utilizes spatial diversity provided by the multiantenna RSU and relay vehicles to improve the transmission reliability of downlink control messages. In addition, to address the additive effects of the jamming signals and the intergroup interference, the relay selection problem and the beamformer design problem are jointly considered, which is modeled as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. Then, we address this challenging problem by relaxing it into a series of convex subproblems via the semi-definite relaxation (SDR) and convex–concave process (CCP) methods, and then propose to solve these convex subproblems iteratively. The simulation results show that our proposed method convergences rapidly, and compared to the benchmark schemes, significant performance gains can be observed.