Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Scheme for Cognitive Radio Networks

In order to solve the uncertainty resulting from shadowing effect and resist the attack from malicious cognitive radio (CR) users, we propose a fault-tolerant cooperative spectrum sensing scheme for CR networks, where an energy detection-based local spectrum sensing is performed at each CR user, a coefficient is used to weight each CR user’s sensing result, a linear weighted fusion process is performed at the fusion center (FC) to combine received sensing results. For a fault-tolerant cooperative spectrum sensing scheme, the most important issue is to distinguish whether the CR user is reliable or not. In this paper, a reputation-based cooperative mechanism is presented to alleviate the influence of the unreliable sensing results from CR users suffering shadowing and the false sensing data from malicious CR users on the detection result at the FC. In proposed fault-tolerant cooperative scheme, each cooperative CR user has a reputation degree which is initialized and adjusted by the FC and used to weight the sensing result from the corresponding user in the fusion process at the FC. And then, two reputation degree adjusting methods are presented to manage the reputation degree of each CR user. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can not only weaken the harmful influence caused by malicious CR users, but also alleviate the corrupted detection problem resulting from destructive channel condition between the primary transmitter and the CR user. Moreover, the detection performance of the fault-tolerant cooperative scheme, which has a feasible computational complexity and needs no instantaneous SNRs, is close to that of the optimal scheme.