Efficient OFDM Denial: Pilot Jamming and Pilot Nulling

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) uses pilot tones to estimate the channel's frequency response and perform equalization. It is commonly known that jamming pilot tones is more efficient than broadband attacks against an entire OFDM signal. This paper builds on this idea and introduces the pilot nulling attack, which is considerably more efficient than simple pilot jamming, by driving received pilot energy as close to zero as possible. This paper presents our channel and equalizer model, and then undertakes an analysis of OFDM under these attacks, verifying the assessment through simulation. For a target bit error rate of 0.4, QPSK underlying modulation, and pilot tone density of 1/8, we discover that pilot jamming is roughly 2 dB more efficient than barrage jamming, and pilot nulling is roughly 7.5 dB more efficient than barrage jamming. In all cases, pilot nulling is capable of fully denying the target signal at 4 dB of signal-to-jamming ratio by driving the QPSK bit error rate to 0.5.