We propose a deception mechanism to combat a compromised station in IEEE 802.11 channel hopping systems. A compromised station can follow the hopping channels and continuously attack them, since it recognizes the channel-hopping sequence. The key concept of the deception mechanism is that an access point notifies a new hopping seed but not to the jammer, while a deception station deceives the jammer. Simulations show that the proposed scheme increases network throughput compared to conventional channel hopping schemes when they are under compromised station attacks.

We propose a control-channel-hopping scheme to mitigate scrambling attacks in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems. A scrambling attack can be realized by jamming specific frames after monitoring the control channel or by jamming the control channel itself. This letter details a situation in which the control channel is scattered among OFDMA subcarriers. The scattered control channel has a two-dimensional hopping sequence with a mixed order. Simulation results show that our scheme can prevent a jammer from monitoring the control channel and from attacking the channel itself.

In cognitive radio networks, secondary users exchange control information to utilize the available channels efficiently, to maintain connectivity, to negotiate for data communication such as sender-receiver handshakes, for neighbor discovery etc. This task is not trivial in cognitive radio networks due to the dynamic nature of network environment. Generally, this problem is tackled by using two famous approaches. The first one is the use of common control channel (CCC) and the second one is using channel hopping (a.k.a sequence-based protocols). The use of CCC simplifies the processes of MAC protocols. However, it may not be feasible in cognitive radio networks as the available channels, including control channel, are dynamically changing according to primary user activities. Channel hopping approaches can tolerate the failure of network due to primary user activities. But it causes significant amount of channel access delay which is known as time to rendezvous (TTR). In this paper, we propose a hybrid protocol of these two mechanisms. This hybrid protocol can maintain connectivity and it can guarantee the secondary users to be able to exchange necessary control information in dynamic environment. In our hybrid protocol, we use multiple control channels. If some control channels are unavailable in case of primary user appearances, secondary users still can communicate on different control channels, so it can be more tolerable primary user activities than normal CCC approaches. Channel hopping is performed only for control channels, so it provides relatively small amount of channel access delay.