Jamming Attack on DSRC Communication Caused by a C-V2X Sidelink Device

Academia and industry are constantly striving to improve the driving experience, where vehicles can now communicate, and different technologies can coexist and share the wireless medium to send and receive information. In terms of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, vehicles can use Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) or Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) sidelink technologies to communicate on the roads by sharing the 5.9 GHz band. However, coexistence between the two technologies remains challenging, as interference can occur when both technologies use co-channels to send vehicle messages in parallel, degrading the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) metric. In addition, malicious users can carry out various types of attacks to disrupt the vehicle connection, such as jamming attacks. In this paper, we transmitted packets using a constant bit rate (CBR). We considered Line-of-Sight (LOS) and Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) scenarios (i.e., in the DSRC communication) to understand how damaging the jamming attack can be. Based on our tests, the jamming attack caused by the C-V2X co-channel interference can cause an attenuation in the signal loss of up to 24 dB (i.e., using a packet size of 256 bytes) and up to 35 dB (i.e., using a packet size of 1,399 bytes), and signal-to-interference and noise ratio (SINR) by up to 26 dB (i.e., using a packet size of 256 bytes) and up to 40 dB (i.e., using a packet size of 1,399 bytes). Furthermore, we analyzed the interference effects in different data rates such as 3, 4.5, 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, and 27 Mbps.