Detection of Power Increasing Noise-Like Smart Jammers

This paper addresses the problem of detecting a Noise-Like Jammer (NLJ) that gradually increases the transmitted power, rather than quickly transmitting all the available one. This power control strategy can bypass conventional electronic countermeasures, since classical methods are based on the detection of a noise power discontinuity in the window under test (WUT). To address this issue, we recently proposed two novel NLJ detection architectures by assuming specific models for NLJ power variation during the design stage. The first model is based on a linear law for NLJ power variation over the observation time. In contrast, the second model supposes unconstrained fluctuations in the NLJ power within the WUT. To test these hypotheses, we have made ad hoc modifications of the generalized likelihood ratio test, where the unknown parameters are estimated through iterative procedures. The performance analysis, conducted using synthetic data, demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed detectors over the conventional approach. Moreover, we show that one of the proposed detectors returns a constant false alarm rate for a wide range of noise power levels, whereas the probability of false alarm for the other detector is lower than the nominal one when the noise power level changes.