ReDiSen: Reputation-based secure cooperative sensing in distributed cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio techniques represent an emerging approach for mitigating the spectrum scarcity problem in wireless communications. Cooperative sensing is an effective solution to improve sensing accuracy and robustness in the presence of fading and shadowing that make individual sensing less reliable. However, when an adversary can corrupt some nodes in the network, the effectiveness of cooperative sensing may degrade dramatically. We design the first fully distributed security scheme ReDiSen to counter attacks in cooperative sensing. We apply reputation generated from exchanged sensing results as an aid to restrict the impact of the malicious behaviours. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results indicate that ReDiSen provides an effective countermeasure against security attacks by enabling secondary users to obtain more accurate cooperative sensing results in adversarial environments. ReDiSen does not rely on a central authority, nor a common control channel, and is therefore more applicable in dynamic cognitive radio networks.