Dynamic Spectrum Allocation Based Confidentiality for Cognitive Radio Networks

The paradigm of dynamic spectrum access, an intrinsic characteristic of the cognitive radio network (CRN), embraces new opportunity for protecting the privacy of communication content through random channel hopping patterns, which are hard to follow by adversaries. Different from conventional DSA where each active CR user only accesses the spectrum once, the confidentiality driven DSA requires every active user to hop over multiple channels during one transmission session. Hence the DSA process is modeled as a fractional coloring process. By artfully converting two-dimensional color to one-dimensional color through vertex expansion, a Latin square (LS) based DSA is proposed, with confidentiality requirements embedded. Theoretic analysis and simulation results verify the feasibility of the DSA based cryptography and illustrates how confidentiality requirement affects the spectrum utilization efficiency.