A Collaborative Approach towards Securing Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio (CR) is introduced to accommodate the steady increment in the spectrum demand. Spectrum sensing is used to detect the unexploited sub-bands in the radio environment. In order to improve the accuracy of the spectrum sensing, the cooperative spectrum sensing method is assumed to be the best method to be used. However, misbehaving sensing nodes might falsify the spectrum sensing data to prevent legitimate nodes from utilizing the spectrum. Hence, wireless security has become an important issue in cognitive radio networks to ensure a reliable spectrum sensing and a fair resource allocation and management. A node misbehaves during the spectrum sensing phase by sending false sensing data to other cooperative sensing nodes. In this paper we propose a novel collaborative approach during spectrum sensing phase to monitor sensing nodes' behavior and identify the misbehaving sensing nodes. The proposed approach measures the node's reliability through a value called belief level (BL). The clustering method is used to divide all the sensing nodes in a specific number of clusters. Each cluster has a cluster head (CH) which is responsible for collecting sensing reports from different cognitive nodes in the same cluster about each other and identifying the misbehaving sensing nodes. Simulation results show the added value and the effectiveness of the proposed approach. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.