Improved cooperative spectrum sensing under primary user emulation attacks in cognitive radio networks

Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN) is increasingly becoming an important technology in wireless communication networks because of its potential and ability to improve the utilization of radio spectrum. Such networks implement co-operative spectrum sensing technique to locate vacant bands and apply strategies to decide when, how and in which band they may choose to communicate. In realizing this, the network is exposed to a major threat known as Primary User Emulation Attack (PUEA), in which malicious users may tend to destruct the spectrum sensing process by imitating the primary user signal and deceive the Secondary Users (SU) from transmitting in the identified vacant spectral bands. In this article, we aim to improve the cooperative spectrum sensing performance in order to mitigate the activities of PUEA in the network. We propose a new energy detection cooperative spectrum sensing technique in cognitive radio networks which will assist secondary users in accurately detecting primary user signals in spectral bands with (PUEA) present in the network. Comparing our proposed method to other existing cooperative spectrum sensing methods, the results show that our proposed technique can effectively assist secondary users in reducing the errors that occurs during detection of primary user signals and also mitigate the activities of (PUEA).