Soft Cooperative Spectrum Sensing using Quantization Method in the Presence of Smart PUE Attack

Abstract

To overcome the frequency spectrum scarcity, cognitive radio (CR) network is proposed where secondary users opportunistically use vacant frequency band. CR intrinsic properties impose threats to these wireless networks. Smart primary user emulation attack (PUEA) is one of these threats where a malicious user performs spectrum sensing and after being aware of radio environment sends fake signals identical to the primary user signals with the desired signal occurrences in both vacant and occupied licensed frequency bands. In this paper, while considering smart PUEA, we propose a soft cooperative spectrum sensing method. In this method, the sensing information values of N secondary users are transmitted to the fusion center (FC) and combined with some coefficients with the aim of minimizing the error probability of primary user detection, under the given constant false alarm probability. We also propose a method for quantization of this sensing information that should be sent to FC. Furthermore, we have worked on the investigation of channel estimation error impact on detection performance. Simulation results show that our method significantly improves the spectrum sensing probability of the error, in comparison with hard combination scheme, AND fusion and OR fusion rules, either considering quantization or in the presence of channel estimation error.