Trust-based multi-hop cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks

Cooperative spectrum sensing is one of the solutions for cognitive radio networks, which can resolve the uncertainty of stand-alone spectrum sensing. It means that each secondary user senses defined spectrum bands for the unused spectrum detection and shares its sensing results with the others to improve the accuracy of spectrum sensing. Due to the presence of malicious secondary users and their fake sensing reports, various forms of attacks will be encountered that reduce the performance of cooperative spectrum sensing. Spectrum sensing data falsification attack (SSDF) is one of the attacks that some research works have been presented to defend against it, based on trust and reputation management (TRM). Previous works assume that all the secondary users are in the transmission range of each other and one-hop sensing reports are provided. However, multi-hop dissemination of sensing reports is a necessary scenario for the secondary users with limited energy sources and its security attacks are very challenging to be encountered. In this paper, a trust-based multi-hop cooperative spectrum sensing method is proposed to deal with SSDF attack. Simulation results show that this scheme improves spectrum sensing accuracy and reduces. (c) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.