Secure routing and resource allocation based on game theory in cooperative cognitive radio networks

The era of big data is here now, and spectrum resources are increasingly scarce in heterogeneous network environment. The spectrum efficiency and secure transmission of big data are important issues. Cognitive radio has been proposed to address the issue of spectrum efficiency, and is a hot topic in the literatures. In multi-hop cooperative cognitive radio networks (CCRNs), secondary users need the primary users' authorization to be relays. Most existing centralized route selection schemes ignore the energy allocation, and thus are inefficient. Moreover, the incomplete of information in multi-hop network leads to many difficulties in cooperation. Inspired by the game theory, a novel strategy is proposed in this paper to defend against insider attacks based on trust. This strategy is denoted as secure routing and resource allocation based on game theory in CCRNs (SRGC). With a reputation updating process and distributed learning algorithm, the proposed strategy can find a best' route, which is relatively safe for each primary transmitter, and at the same time fully utilizes the spectrum and energy. Using NS2, simulations indicate that SRGC can well fit into CCRNs, improve the network performance and defend against the routing disruption attacks. Compared with other schemes, the SRGC results in a performance with better adaptability to the distributed environment. Moreover, SRGC can maximize the average throughput and minimize the data drop ratios. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.