Anti-Jamming Rendezvous Scheme for Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), channel hopping-based communications are widely used to improve channel utilization. However, channel hopping schemes for CRNs are usually vulnerable to jamming attacks, especially when jammers have cognitive radios to perform channel sensing and fast channel switching. Many mitigating approaches for coping with jamming attacks in wireless communications rely on pre-shared secrets (e.g., pre-shared hopping sequences). In CRNs, pre-sharing secrets between senders and receivers is usually impractical (because neighborhood dynamically changes, and receivers of a broadcast may be unknown to the sender). Hence, anti-jamming channel hopping approaches without pre-shared secrets have gained more and more research interests. However, existing approaches either have unbounded time to rendezvous on an available channel (even no signals of jammers and PUs appear), or require role pre-assignment (SUs should be pre-assigned as a sender or receiver). Role pre-assignment is not applicable to environments where each SU may play a sender and a receiver, simultaneously. In this paper, we propose an anti-jamming channel hopping scheme, Sec-CH. Sec-CH has bounded time to rendezvous and can work without role pre-assignment.