Robust Collaborative Spectrum Sensing Schemes for Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio networking allows the unlicensed secondary users to opportunistically access the licensed spectrum as long as the performance of the licensed primary users does not degrade. This dynamic spectrum access strategy is enabled by cognitive radio coupled with spectrum sensing technologies. Due to the imperfection of wireless transmissions, collaborative spectrum sensing (CSS) has been proposed to significantly improve the probability of detecting the transmissions of primary users. Nevertheless, current CSS techniques are sensitive to malicious secondary users, leading to a high false alarm rate and low detection accuracy on the presence of the primary users. In this paper, we present several robust collaborative spectrum sensing schemes that can calculate a trust value for each secondary user to reflect its suspicious level and mitigate its harmful effect on cooperative sensing. Our approach explores the spatial and temporal correlations among the reported information of the secondary users to determine the trust values. Extensive simulation study has been performed and our results demonstrate that the proposed schemes can guarantee the accuracy of the cooperative sensing system with a low false alarm rate when a considerable number of secondary users report false information.