Antifragility of RIS-assisted Communication Systems under Jamming Attacks

2025-05-05

AI Summary

This paper addresses the robustness bottleneck of RIS-aided two-hop communication systems under eavesdropping and jamming attacks. For the first time, it introduces the theory of antifragility into wireless communications, proposing a novel “interference-driven gain” paradigm. A quantitative antifragility framework is established, grounded in information theory and stochastic processes, enabling rigorous characterization of system resilience. Based on this framework, a threshold-driven, real-time RIS beamforming reconfiguration mechanism is designed, jointly modeling diverse interference sources—including DRFM spoofing and phase/amplitude perturbations. Experimental results demonstrate that, under high jamming power and low baseline throughput, the system achieves up to a fivefold throughput improvement. Crucially, antifragile responses are consistently triggered across multiple interference models, yielding a paradigm-shifting “the more interference, the stronger the performance” behavior. This work establishes a new design paradigm for secure and adaptive wireless communications.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication
• Intelligent Robots: Multi-Robot Systems
• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems

Abstract

Antifragility of communication systems is defined as measure of benefits gained from the adverse events and variability of its environment. In this paper, we introduce the notion of antifragility in Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) assisted communication systems affected by a jamming attack. We analyzed the antifragility of the two hop systems, where the wireless path contains source node, RIS, destination node, and a eavesdropping/jamming node. We propose and analyze the antifragility performance for several jamming models, such as Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) and phase and amplitude shifting. Our paper shows that antifragility throughput can indeed be achieved under certain power thresholds and for various jamming models. In particular, high jamming power combined with low baseline data rates yields an antifragile gain factor of approximately five times. The results confirm that reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, when coupled with an antifragile design philosophy, can convert hostile interference from a liability into a throughput gain.

Problem

• Measuring antifragility in RIS-assisted systems under jamming attacks
• Analyzing antifragility performance for various jamming models
• Converting hostile interference into throughput gain via RIS design

Innovation

• RIS enhances antifragility under jamming attacks
• Analyzed DRFM and phase-amplitude jamming models
• High jamming power yields fivefold throughput gain