Detecting the greedy spectrum occupancy threat in cognitive radio networks

Abstract

Recently, security of cognitive radio (CR) is becoming a severe issue. There is one kind of threat, which we call greedy spectrum occupancy threat (GSOT) in this paper, has long been ignored in previous work. In GSOT, a secondary user may selfishly occupy the spectrum for a long time, which makes other users suffer additional waiting time in queue to access the spectrum and leads to congestion or breakdown. In this paper, a queueing model is established to describe the system with greedy secondary user (GSU). Based on this model, the impacts of GSU on the system are evaluated. Numerical results indicate that the steady-state performance of the system is influenced not only by average occupancy time, but also by the number of users as well as number of channels. Since a sudden change in average occupancy time of GSU will produce dramatic performance degradation, the greedy second user prefers to increase its occupancy time in a gradual manner in case it is detected easily. Once it reaches its targeted occupancy time, the system will be in steady state, and the performance will be degraded. In order to detect such a cunning behavior as quickly as possible, we propose a wavelet based detection approach. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and quickness of the proposed approach.