A Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization Based Algorithm for Primary User Emulation Attack Detection

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The cognitive radio network (CRN) has been proposed to overcome the spectrum scarcity and the massive demand on the radio frequencies through efficient utilization and smart management of the free channels. Using a spectrum sensing process, the secondary users (SUs) share the spectrum of the primary users (PUs) without causing any interference to these latter. One of the main threats affecting the channel utilization in CRN is the primary user emulation (PUE) attack. The PUE attack utilizes a sophisticated technique to craft the same signal of a legitimate PU to gain unauthorized access to the unused channels, forcing the SUs to immediately free up vacant spectrum space, resulting in a denial of service (DoS), degradation of service, and causing a noticeable impact on CRN performance. To circumvent this attack, the anchor nodes must accurately estimate the coordinates of the PU signal source. In the literature, most of the localization of unknown signal source, in our case the PU/PUE, are based on the ranging schemes which measure the distance between the blind node and the anchors. Those anchors are aware of their location and situated in optimized positions to the signal source in order to permit an accurate PU/PUE position detection. The detection rate depends tightly on the distance separating the anchors to the signal source as well as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this paper, we demonstrate the impact of the distance on the detection error while highlighting the particle swarm optimization’s (PSO) advantage in optimizing the anchors positioning. Furthermore, we illustrate the SNR impact on the probability of detection, particularly in the situation of low SNR and the attacker in the vicinity to a real PU. The main contribution in this work is the proposition of an approach with the aim of protecting an area containing more than a single PU with a limited number of anchor nodes while providing a higher detection rate to stop any eventual PUE attack. This approach is based on a multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm for PU/PUE position detection. It minimizes concurrently the probability of detection error related to the received signal strength (RSS)/trilateration and the SNR, with the main objective of finding all optimized positions for the mobile anchor nodes and obtains the most accurate PUE attack detection.