Performance Analysis of Primary User Emulation Attack in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive Radio (CR) is a promising technology to efficiently utilize the limited spectrum resources for the rapidly increasing demands on wireless applications and services. Security is very challenging in a CR network due to its unique characteristics, e.g. systems co-existence and interference guarantee. In this paper, we will study the performance of CR networks under Primary User Emulation Attacks (PUEA) that is a typical security issue. A multi-dimensional Markov model is built and the system performance is evaluated under generic system models, including the common control channel (CCC) adoption and a joint PUEA detection and call admission control scheme. We introduce a new performance metric CCC recovery time and redefine outage probability to identify and evaluate the important impact of CCC on the CR network. In addition, we calculate blocking rate, dropping rate, and outage probability of the CR networks. Numerical results show that the system performance may deteriorate severely when attacked. The joint PUEA detection mechanism and guard channel strategy are able to significantly alleviate the performance degradation.