An altruistic differentiated service protocol in dynamic cognitive radio networks against selfish behaviors

Cognitive Radio (CR), first proposed by Mitola, has the potential to improve spectrum utilization by allowing secondary transmission in licensed primary networks, as long as the secondary transmissions do not interfere with the operation of the primary users (PUs) in the primary network. Although it is fundamental to the viability of this burgeoning technology, security aspects of CR have so far received scant attention from researchers. Initial research on CR has largely focused on the issues of resource allocation, spectrum sensing and management while security considerations are often added as an afterthought. As a result, many proposed solutions for CR, have introduced significant security gaps, intensifying the effects of selfishness, inequity, unavailability, or even malicious behaviors. This has posed challenges to quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning in Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) in the face of various network attacks like node masquerading, packet mislabeling and deliberate packet dropping. Since existing routing protocols assume that nodes will forward packets in good faith, the presence of selfish nodes coupled with the dynamic behavior of PUs can lead to excessive packet losses, high delays or even the complete failure of routing protocols in secondary networks. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer Altruistic Differentiated Service Protocol (ADSP) for the dynamic CRNs to address the QoS provisioning issue in CRNs with selfish nodes coexistence. Simulation results demonstrate that the ADSP can achieve much better performance in terms of lower delay, higher throughput and better delivery ratio for the traffic originating from collaborative nodes compared to other cognitive routing protocols in the presence of selfish nodes.