Cooperative spectrum sensing for cognitive radio networks in the presence of smart malicious users

Abstract Cognitive radio (CR) signaling imposes some threats to the network. One of these common threats is commonly referred to as primary user emulation attack, where some malicious users try to mimic the primary signal and deceive secondary users to prevent them from accessing vacant frequency bands. In this paper, we introduce a smart primary user emulation attacker (PUEA) that sends fake signals similar to the primary signal. We assume a smart attacker, in the sense that it is aware of its radio environment and may choose different transmission strategies and then, we compare it to an always present attacker. In the proposed smart attacker strategy, the occurrence of fake signal is adjusted according to the primary user activity. First, we investigate the received signal at the CR users under such attackers. Then, we formulate and derive cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) rules for a cognitive network operating in the presence of a PUEA and propose a new spectrum sensing scheme based on energy detection. Simulation results show that our proposed method can mitigate the destructive effect of PUEA in spectrum sensing, compared to conventional energy detection spectrum sensing.