Detection of primary user emulation attack in cognitive radio environment

Abstract

Cognitive Radio (CR) is a potential solution for radio spectrum limitation problem. It is a promising technology for the ever-developing wireless networks in order to efficiently utilize the limited spectrum resources. It is also a mean to satisfy the rapidly increasing demand for wireless applications and services. But the security from malicious users is an important issue. In this paper a method is proposed to create and detect a primary user emulation (PUE) attack in cognitive radio networks. CR network comes with the great advantage of opportunistic and efficient use of limited spectrum resources. In CR, primary users should have priority over secondary users. Primary user emulation attacks on cognitive radio networks pose a serious threat to the deployment of this. First the position of the transmitter is to be detected to identify an attacker and then effective countermeasures have to be developed. Here we create a PUE attack by adding two incumbents in the scenario in NetSim. One of the incumbents represents a “real” primary user while the second represents a “Malicious” primary user. Also we have analyzed the throughput variation with the keepout distance and mobility velocity. Our next goal is to detect the PUEA by the secondary users. Also we analyze the overhead of the proposed approach and study its detection accuracy through simulation.