Anomaly spectrum usage detection in multihop cognitive radio networks: A cross-layer approach

The introduction of cognitive radio enables system's awareness of their environment and internal state, fulfills the need of dynamic spectrum access for higher spectrum utilization. However, at the same time, the use of cognitive radios further complicates the security problems in wireless networks and introduces additional challenges for a counter measure. Due to the intelligence of the attackers, many of the attacks may be stealthy by nature, such as the anomalous spectrum usage attacks, which usually cannot be detected only using information from one layer of the protocol stack. In this paper, we propose a crosslayer model for anomalous spectrum usage attacks detection with stealthy jammer as a prime example. Quickest detection technique is adopted and embedded in the proposed framework since the attacks usually happen at unknown time and are unpredictable due to the lack of prior knowledge of the attackers. A case study is performed by combining physical layer spectrum sensing with multipath routing at the network layer. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2013 Engineering and Technology Publishing.