Throughput of cognitive radio networks with improved energy detector under security threats

Spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) is subjected to some security threats such as primary user emulation (PUE) attack and spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack. In PUE attack, a malicious user (MU_PUE) transmits an emulated primary signal throughout the spectrum sensing interval to secondary users (SUs) to forestall them from accessing the primary user (PU) spectrum bands. In SSDF attack, malicious users (MU_SSDF) intentionally report false sensing decisions to the fusion center (FC) to influence the overall decision. While most of the existing literatures have studied the effects of these 2 types of attacks separately, the present paper evaluates the secondary network performance in terms of throughput under both the PUE and SSDF attacks with improved energy detectors (IEDs) where SU's spectrum access is hybrid, ie, either in overlay or in underlay mode. An analytical expression on throughput of SU under the simultaneous influence of both of these attacks is developed. Impact of several parameters such as IED parameter, attacker probabilities, and attacker strength on the throughput of SU is investigated. Performance of the present scheme is also compared with only PUE and only SSDF attacks. A simulation test bed is developed in MATLAB to validate our analytical results.     

Neighbor Detection-Based Spectrum Sensing Algorithm in Distributed Cognitive Radio Networks

Security issues of spectrum sensing have drawn a lot of attentions in Cognitive radio networks (CRNs). Malicious users can m islead the network to m ake wrong decision about the states of channels by tampering spectrum sensing data. To defense against Spectrum sens-ing data falsification (SSDF) attack, we propose a neighbor detection-based spectrum sensing algorithm in distributed CRNs, which can detect attackers with the help of neigh-bors during spectrum sensing to improve the accuracy of decision making. The proposed scheme can also guarantee the connectivity of the network. Simulation results illus-trate that the proposed scheme can defense against SSDF attacks effectively and reach the unified information of spectrum sensing data.     

抗SSDF攻击的一致性协作频谱感知方案

在分布式认知无线电网络中,一般很难找到合适的融合中心能够收集所有协作用户的感知信息,而且协作过程极可能遭到篡改感知数据(Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification,SSDF)攻击.鉴于此,该文提出了一种改进的一致性协作频谱感知方案.利用Metropolis迭代规则,各次用户仅依靠邻接点之间的...     

可防御SSDF攻击的宽带压缩频谱感知

SSDF（Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification）攻击是认知无线网络中对频谱感知性能危害最大的攻击方式之一。基于认知无线网络中信号频域的固有稀疏性,本文结合了压缩感知(CS)技术与平均一致(average consensus)算法,建立了可防御SSDF攻击的分布式宽带压缩频谱感知模型。本文建立了次用户的声望值指标,用以在分布式信息融合的过程中更加准确地排除潜在的恶意次用户影响。在感知阶段,各个CR节点对接收到的主用户信号进行压缩采样以减少对宽带信号采样的开销和复杂度,并做出本地频谱估计。在信息融合阶段,各CR节点的本地频谱估计结果以分布式的方式进行信息融合,排除潜在恶意次用户的影响,得到最终的频谱估计结果。仿真结果表明,本文提出的分布式频谱感知模型可以有效地抵御SSDF攻击,提高了频谱感知的性能。      

Distributed cooperative spectrum sensing based on reinforcement learning in cognitive radio networks

Spectrum sensing is an initial task for the successful operation of cognitive radio networks (CRN). During cooperative spectrum sensing, malicious secondary user (SU) may report false sensing data which would degrade the final aggregated sensing outcome. In this paper, we propose a distributed cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) method based on reinforcement learning (RL) to remove data fusion between users with different reputations in CRN. This method regards each SU as an agent, which is selected from the adjacent nodes of CRN participating in CSS. The reputation value is used as reward to ensure that the agent tends to merge with high reputation nodes. The conformance fusion is adopted to promote consensus of the whole network, while it’s also compared with the decision threshold to complete CSS. Simulation results show that the proposed method can identify malicious users effectively. As a result, the whole CRN based on RL is more intelligent and stable.     

Optimal Mode Selection Policies in Cognitive Radio Networks with RF Energy Harvesting

Applying energy harvesting technology in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) leads to a tradeoff between the time allocated for spectrum sensing followed by spectrum accessing and that for energy harvesting. This tradeoff can be formulated as a mode selection problem for the secondary users. In this paper, we consider a CRN working in the time-slotted manner. The secondary users powered by radio frequency energy harvesting can perform overlay transmission or cooperate with the primary users. To maximize the long-term throughput of the secondary network, we propose two optimal mode selection policies by formulating this problem under a partially observable Markov decision process framework. Numerical simulations show that both of our proposed policies achieve more throughput than the overlay-only policy. Finally, we also evaluate the effect of the cooperative threshold and the energy harvesting process on the optimal policies.     

Improving Voice‐Service Support in Cognitive Radio Networks

Voice service is very demanding in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). The available spectrum in a CRN for CR users varies owing to the presence of licensed users. On the other hand, voice packets are delay sensitive and can tolerate a limited amount of delay. This makes the support of voice traffic in a CRN a complicated task that can be achieved by devising necessary considerations regarding the various network functionalities. In this paper, the support of secondary voice users in a CRN is investigated. First, a novel packet scheduling scheme that can provide the required quality of service (QoS) to voice users is proposed. The proposed scheme utilizes the maximum packet transmission rate for secondary voice users by assigning each secondary user the channel with the best level of quality. Furthermore, an analytical framework developed for a performance analysis of the system, is described in which the effect of erroneous spectrum sensing on the performance of secondary voice users is also taken into account. The QoS parameters of secondary voice users, which were obtained analytically, are also detailed. The analytical results were verified through the simulation, and will provide helpful insight in supporting voice services in a CRN.     

CoPD: a conjugate prior based detection scheme to countermeasure spectrum sensing data falsification attacks in cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio networks are a promising solution to the spectrum scarcity issue. In cognitive radio networks, cooperative spectrum sensing is critical to accurately detect the existence of a primary user (PU) signal, because the local spectrum sensing by a single secondary user (SU) has low reliability. Unfortunately, cooperative spectrum sensing is vulnerable to the spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack. Specifically, a malicious user can send a falsified sensing report to mislead other (benign) SUs to make an incorrect decision on the PU activity, to cause either denial of service to benign SUs or harmful interference to PUs. Therefore, detecting the SSDF attack is extremely important for robust cooperative spectrum sensing. This paper proposes a distributed defense scheme, termed conjugate prior based SSDF detection (CoPD), to countermeasure the SSDF attack. CoPD can effectively exclude the malicious sensing reports from SSDF attackers, so that benign SUs can effectively detect the PU activity. Furthermore, CoPD can also exclude abnormal sensing reports from ill-functioned SUs. Simulation results indicate that CoPD achieves very good performance to accomplish robust cooperative spectrum sensing.     

利用分组过滤加强SSDF攻击防御的方案设计

在协作频谱感知网络中,设备故障、信道阴影衰落和噪声等会导致频谱感知器(如手机、平板等)发送的信息不可靠,而恶意用户在协作频谱感知网络中,也会发送错误的感知信息以混淆视听,干扰诚实用户的判决结果。不可靠消息在邻居用户间的传递必将导致感知结果产生偏差和错误,大大降低了协作频谱感知的效率。为解决上述问题,本文将置信传播算法和信誉模型相结合,提出一种基于次用户分组的频谱感知数据伪造(SSDF,Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification)攻击防御方案。该方案分两个阶段对不可靠信息进行过滤:首先,在频谱感知阶段,通过置信传播算法对次用户进行分组,过滤掉因设备故障等因素产生的不可靠用户,剩余用户则视为正常工作用户进行数据融合。然后,在数据融合阶段,根据以信誉值作为权重因子的置信传播算法来计算最终的判决值。本文所提方案分别在感知阶段和融合阶段采取了防御措施,可有效地过滤网络中的不可靠信息,减小恶劣的频谱环境对次用户感知结果的影响。仿真结果表明,本文所提方案迭代次数少、收敛快,有效地减弱了SSDF攻击带来的损害,提高了感知结果的准确性、增强了认知无线网络的安全性。      

无线认知传感器网络协同频谱感知安全模型和攻击模型研究

无线认知传感器网络(WCSN)中的协同频谱感知技术能够大大提高检测主用户传输的概率.但是,在当前的协同频语感知方案中,通常假定所有协同次用户都是诚信可靠的,因而恶意次用户可能会通过报告错误检测结果来攻击网络.本文分析了无线认知传感器网络(WCSN )的基本概念和优势,给出了无线认知传感器网络体系结构,提出了协同频谱感知...     

Comprehensive Survey on Quality of Service Provisioning Approaches in Cognitive Radio Networks: Part One

Much interest in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) has been raised recently by enabling unlicensed (secondary) users to utilize the unused portions of the licensed spectrum. CRN utilization of residual spectrum bands of Primary (licensed) Networks (PNs) must avoid harmful interference to the users of PNs and other overlapping CRNs. The coexisting of CRNs depends on four components: Spectrum Sensing, Spectrum Decision, Spectrum Sharing, and Spectrum Mobility. Various approaches have been proposed to improve Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning in CRNs within fluctuating spectrum availability. However, CRN implementation poses many technical challenges due to a sporadic usage of licensed spectrum bands, which will be increased after deploying CRNs. Unlike traditional surveys of CRNs, this paper addresses QoS provisioning approaches of CRN components and provides an up-to-date comprehensive survey of the recent improvement in these approaches. Major features of the open research challenges of each approach are investigated. Due to the extensive nature of the topic, this paper is the first part of the survey which investigates QoS approaches on spectrum sensing and decision components respectively. The remaining approaches of spectrum sharing and mobility components will be investigated in the next part.     

The Optimal Spectrum Sensing Time for Maximizing Throughput of 802.11-Based MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks Under Unsaturated Traffic Conditions

Cognitive radio has attracted considerable attention as an enabling technology for addressing the problem of radio frequency shortages. In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), secondary users (SUs) are allowed to opportunistically utilize the licensed spectrum bands of primary users (PUs) when these bands are temporarily unused. Thus, SUs should monitor the licensed spectrum bands to detect any PU signal. According to the sensing outcomes, SUs should vacate the spectrum bands or may use them. Generally, the spectrum sensing accuracy depends on the sensing time which influences the overall throughput of SUs. That is, there is a fundamental tradeoff between the spectrum sensing time and the achievable throughput of SUs. To determine the optimal sensing time and improve the throughput of SUs, considerable efforts have been expended under the saturated traffic and ideal channel assumptions. However, these assumptions are hardly valid in practical CRNs. In this paper, we provide the framework of an 802.11-based medium access control for CRNs, and we analyze this framework to find the optimal spectrum sensing time under the saturated and unsaturated traffic condition. Through simulation, the proposed analytic model is verified and the fundamental problem of the sensing-throughput tradeoff for CRNs is investigated.     

基于ESD测试的无线电网络抗SSDF攻击协作频谱感知方案

针对认知无线电网络中协作频谱感知容易遭受数据伪造攻击的问题,提出一种基于检验统计和极端学生化偏差检验法的协作频谱感知方案。首先,将差分进化算法与加权增益合并软决策融合方法相结合,形成一种高效的节点决策融合机制。然后,在协作感知中,根据节点的软决策数据,利用检验统计消除故障认知节点。最后,利用提出的改进型ESD检验法消除恶意认知节点,从而形成全局决策。仿真结果表明,该方案在协作感知中能够有效过滤SSDF攻击数据,具有较低的误检测率。     

Weight sequential log-likelihood ratio detect algorithm with malicious users removing

Due to the openness of the cognitive radio network, spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) can attack the spectrum sensing easily, while there is no effective algorithm proposed in current research work, so this paper introduces the malicious users removing to the weight sequential probability radio test (WSPRT). The terminals' weight is weighted by the accuracy of their spectrum sensing information, which can also be used to detect the malicious user. If one terminal owns a low weight, it can be treated as malicious user, and should be removed from the aggregation center. Simulation results show that the improved WSPRT can achieve higher performance compared with the other two conventional sequential detection methods under different number of malicious users.     

Mitigating spectrum sensing data falsification attack in ad hoc cognitive radio networks

In a cognitive radio ad hoc network, there is no central authority. Hence, distributed collaborative spectrum sensing (CSS) plays a major role in achieving an accurate spectrum sensing result. However, CSS is sensitive to spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack, in which a malicious user falsifies its local sensing report before disseminating it into the network. To capture such abnormal behavior of a node, we present an approach for detecting SSDF attack based on dissimilarity score. A secondary user (SU) computes the dissimilarity score of its neighbors from the messages received from its h‐hop neighbors. Further, we also present how the proposed scheme can be used on the sequence of sensing reports to detect and isolate the malicious SUs on the fly.     

Joint optimisation of transmission and waiting times in cognitive radio

Transmission time optimisation is one of the key considerations of cognitive network design. There are many studies in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) focusing on finding the best transmission time for secondary users (SUs) to maximise transmission or energy efficiency. While longer sensing duration leads to a higher sensing accuracy and causes less interference, the SU spends less time for transmission and more energy on sensing spectrum. On the other hand, when the transmission duration becomes longer, although the SU has more opportunities to access the channel, it may encounter higher interference due to primary user (PU) returns and the probability of collision becomes higher. In this article, in a decentralised slotted protocol for CRN, the SU spectrum access is proved as a renewal process, then the interference due to PU return during SU transmission, the missed opportunities due to waiting for the channel to become idle and the energy consumed by the SU in the whole spectrum access process including idling energy, transmission energy and sensing energy consumption are formulated and integrated into newly defined efficiency to obtain the optimum transmission time and waiting time.     

MaxDiv: an optimal randomized spectrum access with maximum diversity scheme for cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio network (CRN) is an emerging technology that can increase the utilization of spectrum underutilized by primary users (PUs). In the literature, most exiting investigations on CRNs have focused on how secondary users (SUs) can coexist harmlessly with the PUs. Despite the importance of such a coexistence issue, it is also crucial to investigate the coexistence of SUs because (i) the PUs usually rarely use the licensed spectrum and (ii) the advantages of CRN will significantly increase the number of SUs in the future. To address this challenging issue, we propose, in this paper, an optimal randomized spectrum access scheme, whose main ideas include the following: (i) an SU shares its sensing results with neighboring SUs and (ii) with the regional sensing results, an SU will access available channels with a non‐uniform probability distribution. We first formulate a multichannel optimal randomized multiple access (MC‐ORMA) problem that aims to maximize the throughput of the CRN; we then develop efficient distributed algorithms to solve the MC‐ORMA problem; we derive the closed‐form value of collision probability for each SU; and finally, we conduct extensive numerical experiments and compare our theoretical analysis with simulation results to demonstrate the advantages of our scheme. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

一种SSDF攻击检测的证据理论合作频谱感知算法

现有的基于证据理论的合作频谱感知认为所有认知用户都是诚实的,没有考虑恶意用户的存在。当恶意用户篡改本地感知的结果,发送错误的数据到数据融合中心,将会降低合作频谱感知的性能,这种攻击称为频谱感知数据篡改（spectrum sensing data falsification,SSDF）攻击。由于恶意用户发送的证据与其它认知用户的证据存在差别,本文使用Jousselme距离来衡量证据的可信度,提出一种SSDF攻击检测算法。数据融合中心接收所有认知用户的证据,让可信度低的证据不参与融合判决,可信度高的证据根据可信度进行加权融合。仿真结果表明,所提出的SSDF攻击检测算法在恶意用户发起SSDF攻击时可以很好的改善频谱感知性能。      

Joint Spectrum Allocation and Relay Selection in Cellular Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) has been proposed in recent years to solve the spectrum scarcity problem by exploiting the existence of spectrum holes. One of the important issues in the cellular CRNs is how to efficiently allocate primary user (PU) spectrum inside a CRN cell without causing harmful interference to PUs. In this paper, we present a cross-layer framework which jointly considers spectrum allocation and relay selection with the objective of maximizing the minimum traffic demand of secondary users (SUs) in a CRN cell. Specifically, we consider (1) CRN tries to utilize PU spectrum even when the CRN cell is not completely outside the protection region of the PU cell, and (2) cooperative relay is used in cellular CRNs to improve the utilization of PU spectrum. We formulate this cross-layer design problem as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) and propose a low complexity heuristic algorithm to solve it. Compared to a simple channel allocation scheme, the numerical results show a significant improvement by using our proposed method and the performance is close to the optimal solution. We further consider the spectrum allocation among several CRN cells with the objective of maximizing the overall minimum throughput of all cells while ensuring each individual cell’s minimum throughput requirement. A low complexity algorithm is proposed to achieve the objective with satisfactory performance.     

Detection of malicious users in cognitive radio ad hoc networks: A non-parametric statistical approach

Cognitive radio ad hoc networks (CRAHN) operation is based on the reliability of the spectrum sensing. It has been proved that cooperation between secondary users improves the accuracy of the sensing information gathered by the users. However, such cooperation also increases the vulnerability of the network and its exposure to attacks. The paper presents a novel algorithm based on the non-parametric Kruskal–Wallis and Conover–Inman tests to detect and identify the attack of malicious users at the MAC layer. The algorithm, denoted by KWD, does not assume a priori knowledge neither of the activity of the primary channel nor of the existence and the behavior of malicious users.