Securing delay-sensitive cognitive radio IoT communications under reactive jamming attacks: Spectrum assignment perspective

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the problem of securing time-critical communications in a hardware constrained cognitive radio IoT (CRIoT) networks under reactive jamming attacks. The main goal is to maximize the number of served CRIoT communicating pairs with the least possible packet-invalidity probability with respect to both user selection and spectrum assignment (performing the spectrum assignment in a batch-by-batch basis). This enables multiple CRIoT transmissions to proceed simultaneously over secured channels while guaranteeing delay requirements for the time-critical traffic. The channel assignment problem is formulated as an optimization problem subject to hardware, delay, invalidity and interference constraints. This problem is shown to be a unimodular integer linear programming problem (ILP) that has a polynomial-time complexity. Simulation results show that the developed batch-based assignment simultaneously provides secured channel-assignment decisions for multiple CRIoT devices, which significantly mitigate the effect of reactive jamming and improve network throughput.