A Stable Defense Reference for Cooperative Spectrum Sensing and Its Performance Analysis

Abstract

Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) in cognitive radio networks plays an important role in saluting the problem of spectrum scarcity. Unfortunately, the existence of spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack, also known as Byzantine attack, brings fatal threat to the reliability of CSS. In SSDF attack, malicious user(s) will send false sensing results to the fusion center to mislead the global decision about spectrum occupancy. In order to have a sufficient acknowledgement of spectrum state, we introduce an stable defense reference on the basis of existing defense references in this paper. Not only has the drawback that the existing defense references have strong assumptions such as the attackers are in minority and/or a trusted node exists for data fusion been overcome, but also situation such as sensors' sensing and reporting process has been taken into account, which is much closer to the actual situation. Based on the proposed reference, we also adopt a novel and easy to implement technique to counter Byzantine attacks in CRNs. Our analysis indicates that the proposed reference is robust against Byzantine attacks and can successfully remove the Byzantines in a short time span.