A Trust Based Cooperative Spectrum Sensing for Mitigating SSDF Attack

Abstract

Spectrum scarcity is the one of the major challenges in wireless communication networks. Unfortunately some frequency bands in the spectrum are largely unoccupied and also most of the time, some other frequency bands are partially occupied. This under-utilization of radio spectrum is minimized by a technique, called Cognitive radio. Due to openness of the cognitive radio, it is vulnerable to suffer from many security attacks at various layers of OSI stack. Among them, SSDF attack can incur severe impact on cooperative spectrum sensing performance, in which malicious secondary users (MUs) send false local sensing result to its neighboring secondary users or fusion center (FC). Mitigating or eliminating the SSDF attack in cognitive radio networks is a tough task. In this paper, we first discuss the various types of SSDF attacks and then concentrate on random false attack. Afterword, a trust based cooperative spectrum sensing algorithm is proposed to mitigating the random false attack. In this approach, the local sensing result of secondary users can be considered at the fusion center based on their trust values. The MATLAB simulation result shows that a trust based cooperative sensing gives better system performance comparing with traditional cooperative sensing network.