NoiseOFF: A Backoff Protocol for a Dynamic, Noisy World

This paper gives a dynamic backoff protocol, called NoiseOFF, that provides constant throughput with online packet arrivals. NoiseOFF tolerates disruptive jamming/noise, and by leveraging low-power monitoring, it ensures low energy usage. The packet arrivals are determined adaptively by an adversary, who also incarnates all faulty devices in the system and uses them to launch attacks. The paper analyzes the cases where the total number of packets is (1) a finite number $n$ and (2) infinite. In the first case, NoiseOFF achieves constant expected throughput and, in the second, constant throughput with probability 1. NoiseOFF is provably robust to adaptive adversarial jamming. To model the energy constraints of these networks, there is an associated cost of 1 to access the channel in a time slot, and a cost of 0 for low-power monitoring that can determine if the channel is busy (but does not receive messages). For an adversary who incurs a cost of $J$ to jam, NoiseOFF provides the following guarantees. When the number of packets is a finite n, the average expected cost for successfully sending a packet is $O(\log^2(n + J))$. In the infinite case, the average expected cost for successfully sending a packet is $O(\log^2(\eta) + \log^2(J))$ where $\eta$ is the maximum number of packets that are ever in the system concurrently.