Cognitive Radio for Smart Grid with Security Considerations

In this paper, we investigate how Cognitive Radio as a means of communication can be utilized to serve a smart grid deployment end to end, from a home area network to power generation. We show how Cognitive Radio can be mapped to integrate the possible different communication networks within a smart grid large scale deployment. In addition, various applications in smart grid are defined and discussed showing how Cognitive Radio can be used to fulfill their communication requirements. Moreover, information security issues pertained to the use of Cognitive Radio in a smart grid environment at different levels and layers are discussed and mitigation techniques are suggested. Finally, the well-known Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is integrated with the Cognitive Radio part of a smart grid communication network to protect against unauthorized access to customer’s data and to the network at large

Performance of multi-hop cognitive MIMO relaying networks with joint constraint of intercept probability and limited interference

In this paper, we propose a multi-hop multiple input multiple output (MIMO) decode-and-forward relaying protocol in cognitive radio networks. In this protocol, a multi-antenna secondary source attempts to send its data to a multi-antenna secondary destination with assistance of multiple intermediate multi-antenna nodes, in presence of a multi-antenna secondary eavesdropper. A primary network includes a primary transmitter and a primary receiver which are equipped with multiple antennas, and use transmit antenna selection (TAS) and selection combining (SC) to communicate with each other. Operating on the underlay spectrum sharing method, the secondary source and relay nodes have to adjust their transmit power so that the outage performance of the primary network is not harmful and satisfy the quality of service (QoS). Moreover, these secondary nodes also reduce their transmit power so that the intercept probability (IP) at the eavesdropper at each hop is below a desired value. To improve the outage performance of the secondary network under the joint constraint of IP and limited interference, the TAS/SC method is employed to relay the source data hop-by-hop to the destination. We derived exact closed-form expressions of the end-to-end (e2e) outage probability (OP) and IP of the proposed protocol over Rayleigh fading channels. Monte Carlo simulations are then performed to verify the theoretical derivations

Application of reinforcement learning for security enhancement in cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio network (CRN) enables unlicensed users (or secondary users, SUs) to sense for and opportunistically operate in underutilized licensed channels, which are owned by the licensed users (or primary users, PUs). Cognitive radio network (CRN) has been regarded as the next-generation wireless network centered on the application of artificial intelligence, which helps the SUs to learn about, as well as to adaptively and dynamically reconfigure its operating parameters, including the sensing and transmission channels, for network performance enhancement. This motivates the use of artificial intelligence to enhance security schemes for CRNs. Provisioning security in CRNs is challenging since existing techniques, such as entity authentication, are not feasible in the dynamic environment that CRN presents since they require pre-registration. In addition these techniques cannot prevent an authenticated node from acting maliciously. In this article, we advocate the use of reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve optimal or near-optimal solutions for security enhancement through the detection of various malicious nodes and their attacks in CRNs. RL, which is an artificial intelligence technique, has the ability to learn new attacks and to detect previously learned ones. RL has been perceived as a promising approach to enhance the overall security aspect of CRNs. RL, which has been applied to address the dynamic aspect of security schemes in other wireless networks, such as wireless sensor networks and wireless mesh networks can be leveraged to design security schemes in CRNs. We believe that these RL solutions will complement and enhance existing security solutions applied to CRN To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey article that focuses on the use of RL-based techniques for security enhancement in CRNs

Cognitive radio network in vehicular ad hoc network (VANET): a survey

Cognitive radio network and vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) are recent emerging concepts in wireless networking. Cognitive radio network obtains knowledge of its operational geographical environment to manage sharing of spectrum between primary and secondary users, while VANET shares emergency safety messages among vehicles to ensure safety of users on the road. Cognitive radio network is employed in VANET to ensure the efficient use of spectrum, as well as to support VANET’s deployment. Random increase and decrease of spectrum users, unpredictable nature of VANET, high mobility, varying interference, security, packet scheduling, and priority assignment are the challenges encountered in a typical cognitive VANET environment. This paper provides survey and critical analysis on different challenges of cognitive radio VANET, with discussion on the open issues, challenges, and performance metrics for different cognitive radio VANET applications