Enhanced Throughput Performance of Cognitive Radio Networks under Primary User Emulation Attack with Spectrum Prediction

Abstract

Cognitive radio (CR) technology allows secondary users (SUs) to share primary user's (PU's) spectrum band by adapting its transmission power in a sensing-based spectrum sharing manner. Spectrum sensing is an important activity in the CR network. Spectrum sensing is used to detect availability of a channel in the PU's spectrum band for the SUs. Presence of attackers such as primary user emulation (PUE) attackers in CR networks imposes some security threats to the SUs which affects the spectrum sensing decisions. In PUE attack, SUs are mislead from using the PU's spectrum band which results in degradation of SU's throughput. To enhance SU's throughput, we have considered hybrid spectrum access scheme with spectrum prediction in this paper. In hybrid spectrum access scheme, the SU switches between overlay or underlay modes based on spectrum sensing decision available at SU. In predictive scheme, the SUs will sense only those channels which are predicted to be idle. Simulation results show that degradation in SU's throughput due to presence of PUE attackers can be compensated by using spectrum prediction in conjunction with hybrid spectrum access.