Competitive and fair throughput for co-existing networks under adversarial interference

This paper initiates the formal study of a fundamental problem: How to efficiently allocate a shared communication medium among a set of K co-existing networks in the presence of arbitrary external interference? While most literature on medium access focuses on how to share a medium among nodes, these approaches are often either not directly applicable to co-existing networks as they would violate the independence requirement, or they yield a low throughput if applied to multiple networks. We present the randomized medium access (MAC) protocol COMAC which guarantees that a given communication channel is shared fairly among competing and independent networks, and that the available bandwidth is used efficiently. These performance guarantees hold in the presence of arbitrary external interference or even under adversarial jamming. Concretely, we show that the co-existing networks can use a Ω(ε2 min{ε, 1/poly(K)})-fraction of the non-jammed time steps for successful message transmissions, where ε is the (arbitrarily distributed) fraction of time which is not jammed.