A Secure Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Strategy for Distributed Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) is an emerging wireless communications technique for resolving the significant spectrum scarcity problem. Despite its promising characteristics, CRNs also introduce new security threats especially the internal attacks during the spectrum sensing process, which can degrade the efficiency of spectrum sensing. To address this issue, this paper proposes a distributed cooperative spectrum sensing strategy (DSCS) based on a dynamic reputation model to defend against attacks and provide reliable spectrum sensing. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results indicate that the proposed DSCS strategy can provide an effective countermeasure against the internal spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attacks through enabling secondary users to obtain more accurate cooperative sensing results in adversarial environments. In addition, the DSCS does not rely on a central authority, nor a common control channel, and are therefore applicable in distributed CRNs.