Performance Analysis of Secondary Users in the Presence of Attackers in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio network is regarded as an emerging technology to solve 'spectrum scarcity' through dynamic spectrum access to support exponentially increasing wireless subscriptions. However, spectrum sensing and dynamic spectrum sharing in cognitive radio network invite more security attacks making security as one of the main concerns. In this paper, we analyze the performance of the secondary users in terms of physical-layer security in the presence of both eavesdroppers and jammers in cognitive radio networks. In this case, secondary users not only have to compete against eavesdroppers and jammers (who are trying to reduce the secrecy rates of secondary users) but also have to compete with other secondary users to gain access to idle channels to gain high secrecy rates. The main contribution of this work is to investigate game theoretical model to maximize utility of secondary users in the presence of eavesdroppers and jammers. The proposed approach can be particularized to a scenario with eavesdroppers only or jammers only while evaluating the performance of secondary user physical layer security. Performance of the proposed approach is evaluated with the help of numerical results obtained from simulations and the proposed approach outperforms other existing methods. Furthermore, there is sever impact on utilities (secrecy rates) of secondary users when both eavesdroppers and jammers are active in the network.