A channel hopping based defense method against primary user emulation attack in cognitive radio networks

Abstract

Cognitive radio is a promising technology for the problem of spectrum scarcity. Security issues of this network have attracted great attention in the recent years. Primary user emulation attack is a security threat which can significantly degrade the performance of cognitive networks. In this attack, an attacker emulates the signal of the primary users to prevent the cognitive network from utilization of the channels. In this paper, we study a channel hopping based defense method. In particular, a cognitive network is considered that is under attack by a single attacker. The attacker’s goal is to degrade the total throughput of the cognitive network as much as possible. However, the each cognitive user wants to maximize its own throughput. The interactions among the cognitive users and the attacker are modeled by a multi-player zero-sum game and an algorithm is proposed for obtaining the Nash equilibrium of the game. Simulation results are presented to clarify the performance of the algorithm.