Taking advantage of jamming in wireless networks: A survey

There has been an increasing interest in jamming-based solutions to improve the performance of wireless networks. In such schemes, users would deliberately jam the channel, with a special signal, to improve the efficiency of different operations related to wireless networks especially when high performance is required like in contention resolution, QoS support, and statistics estimation. Thus, in this paper we seek to describe jamming and identify positive employments of the jam signals in such networks. We identify different areas where jamming signals are exploited to improve the performance and to solve problems that may arise in wireless networks. We also attempt to categorize different protocols in some of these areas. We provide a comprehensive survey of different proposals that exploit jamming to efficiently perform operations and solve problems in a wireless network. We highlight challenges, requirements, advantages, and disadvantages of jamming.