A Reputation-Based Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in the Presence of Malicious Byzantine Users

Spectrum sensing (either cooperative or noncooperative) is the key enabling technology to identify unused (free) frequency bands in dynamic spectrum access contexts. We propose a reputation-based cooperative spectrum sensing method that, improving the sensing performance of self-organizable networks, allows the detection and further rejection of all those malicious users that implement Byzantine attacks. The performances of our method are evaluated in terms of detection probability of the primary user, and in terms of the number of both correctly identified attackers and discarded honest users. The simulation results show the robustness of our method in detecting several kinds of Byzantine attacks, outperforming the (blind and non-blind) conventional approaches.