Evaluation of Denial of Service Attacks in Software Defined-Cognitive Radio Networks

Software defined networks (SDN) offer a novel network resource management framework which addresses network resources management challenges. It addresses the spectrum scarcity problem by employing efficient and dynamic spectrum access. Cognitive radio networks (CRN) enables secondary users to coexist with licensed users in non-interfering manner. Unfortunately, SDN is susceptible to security threats. We integrate a SDN and a CRN and evaluate the denial of service (DoS) in the integrated environment. The DoS attack is a threat to SDN based networks. The DoS attack overloads the controller and floods the switch Content Addressable Memory (CAM tables), which degrades the performance of the network. We evaluate the effectiveness of the SDN-Guard and the Jamming Attack in addressing the effects of the DoS. SDN-Guard is designed to minimize the overloading of the controller, and the flow tables while managing the flow routes dynamically, timeouts of entry rule and to aggregate flow rule entries given the probability of the threat of the flow which is determined by an intrusion detection system (IDS). IDS is used to detect and control the jamming attack. It is a set of procedures and systems that are able to identify intrusions in a system. This study evaluates the effects of DoS attack on software defined cognitive radio networks. The study observed that the SDN-Guard detects the DoS attack earlier and it reduces the average round trip time and the average processing time compared to the Jamming Attack Defender.