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 (MUPUE) 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 (MUSSDF) 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.