Robust Performance of a Multitone Firefly Scheme for Time Synchronization of Responsive Vehicle-Protection Jammers

Abstract:
Responsive communications jamming is a promising technology to protect vehicles against radio-controlled improvised explosive devices. Unlike barrage jammers, which continuously transmit jamming signals on pre-defined frequency bands irrespective of any signal activities, responsive jammers periodically perform fast wideband scans of the radio spectrum and are thus able to react to observed threat signals. In this paper, we address the problem of time synchronization between multiple responsive jammers, which is crucial in order to avoid a ringaround effect during a common mission. To this end, we propose a fully distributed time synchronization scheme, which is based on the ‘firefly’ synchronization mechanism known from the area of wireless communication networks. In particular, performance results in the presence of signal fading and a varying number of participating responsive jammers are presented, which illustrate the excellent and robust performance of the proposed synchronization scheme. Index Terms — Electronic warfare, communications jamming, time synchronization, distributed algorithms.