Cooperative sensing of spectrum opportunities

Reliability and availability of sensing information gathered from local spectrum sensing (LSS) by a single Cognitive Radio is strongly affected by the propagation conditions, period of sensing, and geographical position of the device. For this reason, cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) was largely proposed in order to improve LSS performance by using cooperation between Secondary Users (SUs). The goal of this chapter is to provide a general analysis on CSS for cognitive radio networks (CRNs). Firstly, the theoretical system model for centralized CSS is introduced, together with a preliminary discussion on several fusion rules and operative modes. Moreover, three main aspects of CSS that substantially differentiate the theoretical model from realistic application scenarios are analyzed: (i) the presence of spatiotemporal correlation between decisions by different SUs; (ii) the possible mobility of SUs; and (iii) the nonideality of the control channel between the SUs and the Fusion Center (FC). For each aspect, a possible practical solution for network organization is presented, showing that, in particular for the first two aspects, cluster-based CSS, in which sensing SUs are properly chosen, could mitigate the impact of such realistic assumptions

Byzantine Attack and Defense in Cognitive Radio Networks: A Survey

The Byzantine attack in cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS), also known as the spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack in the literature, is one of the key adversaries to the success of cognitive radio networks (CRNs). In the past couple of years, the research on the Byzantine attack and defense strategies has gained worldwide increasing attention. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey and tutorial on the recent advances in the Byzantine attack and defense for CSS in CRNs. Specifically, we first briefly present the preliminaries of CSS for general readers, including signal detection techniques, hypothesis testing, and data fusion. Second, we analyze the spear and shield relation between Byzantine attack and defense from three aspects: the vulnerability of CSS to attack, the obstacles in CSS to defense, and the games between attack and defense. Then, we propose a taxonomy of the existing Byzantine attack behaviors and elaborate on the corresponding attack parameters, which determine where, who, how, and when to launch attacks. Next, from the perspectives of homogeneous or heterogeneous scenarios, we classify the existing defense algorithms, and provide an in-depth tutorial on the state-of-the-art Byzantine defense schemes, commonly known as robust or secure CSS in the literature. Furthermore, we highlight the unsolved research challenges and depict the future research directions.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutoiral

Full-Duplex Cognitive Radio: A New Design Paradigm for Enhancing Spectrum Usage

With the rapid growth of demand for ever-increasing data rate, spectrum resources have become more and more scarce. As a promising technique to increase the efficiency of the spectrum utilization, cognitive radio (CR) technique has the great potential to meet such a requirement by allowing un-licensed users to coexist in licensed bands. In conventional CR systems, the spectrum sensing is performed at the beginning of each time slot before the data transmission. This unfortunately results in two major problems: 1) transmission time reduction due to sensing, and 2) sensing accuracy impairment due to data transmission. To tackle these problems, in this paper we present a new design paradigm for future CR by exploring the full-duplex (FD) techniques to achieve the simultaneous spectrum sensing and data transmission. With FD radios equipped at the secondary users (SUs), SUs can simultaneously sense and access the vacant spectrum, and thus, significantly improve sensing performances and meanwhile increase data transmission efficiency. The aim of this article is to transform the promising conceptual framework into the practical wireless network design by addressing a diverse set of challenges such as protocol design and theoretical analysis. Several application scenarios with FD enabled CR are elaborated, and key open research directions and novel algorithms in these systems are discussed