Detection and Defense of PUEA in Cognitive Radio Network

Abstract

In wireless communication, there is an enormous increase in the number of users which results in spectrum shortage. This can be defeated through dynamic spectrum access scheme and cognitive radio is the best solution to achieve this. A cognitive radio (CR) is programmable, configurable and can dynamically use the spectrum in the wireless environment. One of the important tasks of CR is to perform spectrum sensing. Sensing done on spectrum facilitates the cognitive radio user to find the unoccupied area of the spectrum. This CR is prone to many attacks in the wireless environment like primary user emulation attack (PUEA), denial of service attack, replay attack, etc. Among them, the most important attack is PUEA. When a user mimics the primary user and acquires priority over other users to access the spectrum then it is termed as PUEA. In this work, PUEA detection and its defense techniques have been modeled to avoid the degradation of spectrum. To detect the malicious users feature detection-based sensing with double threshold has been proposed. If the detected signal falls above the upper threshold or below the lower threshold then it is considered as primary user signal, whereas if the signal falls in between the thresholds then that signal is identified as malicious user signal. The detection of PUEA cannot be accurate due to factors like false alarm and miss detection. Hence, a game model has been designed for the legitimate nodes to reach strategic defense decisions in the presence of multiple attackers. Based on the actions of the players, the defenders’ payoff is determined to obtain optimal defense decisions.