Uncoordinated frequency hopping scheme for defense against primary user emulation attack in cognitive radio networks

Abstract Primary User Emulation (PUE) attack is one of the serious attacks in the cognitive radio networks, which could cause the denial of service (DOS) in the secondary networks. In this article, assuming one attacker in the network and in the lack of a central management unit, a distributed scheme based on the uncoordinated frequency hopping technique is proposed to defense against the PUE attack. This scheme consists of two phases. In the synchronization phase, the secondary user (SU) tries to synchronize with its receiver by sending a random pattern in the licensed channels while the attacker tries to prevent the SU from using these channels. In the data-sending phase, the SU sends its data according to the random pattern in the presence of the PUE attacker. In this scheme, the SU can re-sense the selected channel for reducing the effects of the attacker on the overhead of the synchronization phase. The synchronization phase is modeled by a non-zero-sum game between the SU (defender) and attacker. The relevant strategies are then extracted for each player and the Nash equilibrium point of this game is obtained with the game theory analysis. Numerical simulations demonstrated the correctness of the extracted Nash equilibrium point and improvement of the SU throughput in the presence of a PUE attacker.