Quantifying Trust for Robust Fusion While Spectrum Sharing in Distributed DSA Networks

In this paper, we quantify the trustworthiness of secondary nodes that share spectrum sensing reports in a distributed dynamic spectrum access network. We propose a spatio-spectral anomaly monitoring technique that effectively captures anomalies in the spectrum sensing reports shared by individual cognitive radio nodes. Based on this, we propose an optimistic trust model for a system with a normal risk attitude and using approximation to the Beta distribution. For a more conservative and risk averse system, we propose a multinomial Dirichlet distribution-based conservative trust framework. Using a machine learning approach, we classify malicious nodes with a high degree of certainty regardless of their aggressiveness of attacks or variations introduced by the wireless environment. Subsequently, we propose two instantaneous fusion models: 1) optimistic trust-based fusion and 2) conservative trust-based fusion, which exclude untrustworthy sensing reports from participating nodes during spectrum data fusion. Our work considers random, deterministic, and preferential (ON–OFF) attack models to demonstrate the utility of our proposed model under varied attack scenarios. Through extensive simulation experiments, we show that the trust values help identify malicious nodes with a high degree of certainty.