A novel multi-fold security framework for cognitive radio wireless ad-hoc networks

Cognitive Radio (CR) Technology has emerged as a smart and intelligent technology to address the problem of spectrum scarcity and its under-utilization. CR nodes sense the environment for vacant channels, exchange control information, and agree upon free channels list (FCL) to use for data transmission and conclusion. CR technology is heavily dependent on the control channel to dialogue on the exchanged control information which is usually in the Industrial-Scientific-Medical (ISM) band. As the ISM band is publically available this makes the CR network more prone to security vulnerabilities and flaws. In this paper a novel multi-fold security framework for cognitive radio wireless ad-hoc networks has been proposed. Multiple security levels, such as, encryption of beacon frame and privately exchanging the FCL, and the dynamic and adaptive behaviour of the framework makes the proposed protocol more resilient and secure against the traditional security attacks when compared with existing protocols

Enforcement in Dynamic Spectrum Access Systems

The spectrum access rights granted by the Federal government to spectrum users come with the expectation of protection from harmful interference. As a consequence of the growth of wireless demand and services of all types, technical progress enabling smart agile radio networks, and on-going spectrum management reform, there is both a need and opportunity to use and share spectrum more intensively and dynamically. A key element of any framework for managing harmful interference is the mechanism for enforcement of those rights. Since the rights to use spectrum and to protection from harmful interference vary by band (licensed/unlicensed, legacy/newly reformed) and type of use/users (primary/secondary, overlay/underlay), it is reasonable to expect that the enforcement mechanisms may need to vary as well.\ud \ud In this paper, we present a taxonomy for evaluating alternative mechanisms for enforcing interference protection for spectrum usage rights, with special attention to the potential changes that may be expected from wider deployment of Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) systems. Our exploration of how the design of the enforcement regime interacts with and influences the incentives of radio operators under different rights regimes and market scenarios is intended to assist in refining thinking about appropriate access rights regimes and how best to incentivize investment and growth in more efficient and valuable uses of the radio frequency spectrum

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

Resource Allocation for Interference Management in Wireless Networks

Interference in wireless networks is a major problem that impacts system performance quite substantially. Combined with the fact that the spectrum is limited and scarce, the performance and reliability of wireless systems significantly deteriorates and, hence, communication sessions are put at the risk of failure. In an attempt to make transmissions resilient to interference and, accordingly, design robust wireless systems, a diverse set of interference mitigation techniques are investigated in this dissertation. Depending on the rationale motivating the interfering node, interference can be divided into two categories, communication and jamming. For communication interference such as the interference created by legacy users(e.g., primary user transmitters in a cognitive radio network) at non-legacy or unlicensed users(e.g.,secondary user receivers), two mitigation techniques are presented in this dissertation. One exploits permutation trellis codes combined with M-ary frequency shift keying in order to make SU transmissions resilient to PUs’ interference, while the other utilizes frequency allocation as a mitigation technique against SU interference using Matching theory. For jamming interference, two mitigation techniques are also investigated here. One technique exploits time and structures a jammer mitigation framework through an automatic repeat request protocol. The other one utilizes power and, following a game-theoretic framework, employs a defense strategy against jamming based on a strategic power allocation. Superior performance of all of the proposed mitigation techniques is shown via numerical results