Spectrum sharing security and attacks in CRNs: a review

Cognitive Radio plays a major part in communication technology by resolving the shortage of the spectrum through usage of dynamic spectrum access and artificial intelligence characteristics. The element of spectrum sharing in cognitive radio is a fundament al approach in utilising free channels. Cooperatively communicating cognitive radio devices use the common control channel of the cognitive radio medium access control to achieve spectrum sharing. Thus, the common control channel and consequently spectrum sharing security are vital to ensuring security in the subsequent data communication among cognitive radio nodes. In addition to well known security problems in wireless networks, cognitive radio networks introduce new classes of security threats and challenges, such as licensed user emulation attacks in spectrum sensing and misbehaviours in the common control channel transactions, which degrade the overall network operation and performance. This review paper briefly presents the known threats and attacks in wireless networks before it looks into the concept of cognitive radio and its main functionality. The paper then mainly focuses on spectrum sharing security and its related challenges. Since spectrum sharing is enabled through usage of the common control channel, more attention is paid to the security of the common control channel by looking into its security threats as well as protection and detection mechanisms. Finally, the pros and cons as well as the comparisons of different CR - specific security mechanisms are presented with some open research issues and challenges

Cognitive MAC Protocols Using Memory for Distributed Spectrum Sharing Under Limited Spectrum Sensing

The main challenges of cognitive radio include spectrum sensing at the physical (PHY) layer to detect the activity of primary users and spectrum sharing at the medium access control (MAC) layer to coordinate access among coexisting secondary users. In this paper, we consider a cognitive radio network in which a primary user shares a channel with secondary users that cannot distinguish the signals of the primary user from those of a secondary user. We propose a class of distributed cognitive MAC protocols to achieve efficient spectrum sharing among the secondary users while protecting the primary user from potential interference by the secondary users. By using a MAC protocol with one-slot memory, we can obtain high channel utilization by the secondary users while limiting interference to the primary user at a low level. The results of this paper suggest the possibility of utilizing MAC design in cognitive radio networks to overcome limitations in spectrum sensing at the PHY layer as well as to achieve spectrum sharing at the MAC layer.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figure

Prospects and problems of cognitive radio network architectures in wireless sensor networks

Cognitive radio is a technique proposed by Mitola which provides a way to efficiently use precious radio spectrum resources [1, 2]. A cognitive radio recognizes, analyzes, and learns the situations of the radio spectrum and then employs various strategies to maximize spectrum usage. The concept of cognitive radio is to detect and ascertain \vhich aspect of the spectrum is presently unused, and then perform data transmission at the newly discovered frequency band. An alternative cognitive radio scheme is to transmit signals on top of existing transmissions as long as the interference temperature measure is lower than threshold. Spectrum sharing, spectrum sensing, and spectrum management are the stages of a cognitive radio. Spectrum sensing gathers up-to-date spectrum usage data, spectrum management determines the optimal spectrum access timing and scheme, and spectrum sharing ensures that users are served in a fair and timely mann

Adaptive Modulation in Multi-user Cognitive Radio Networks over Fading Channels

In this paper, the performance of adaptive modulation in multi-user cognitive radio networks over fading channels is analyzed. Multi-user diversity is considered for opportunistic user selection among multiple secondary users. The analysis is obtained for Nakagami-$m$ fading channels. Both adaptive continuous rate and adaptive discrete rate schemes are analysed in opportunistic spectrum access and spectrum sharing. Numerical results are obtained and depicted to quantify the effects of multi-user fading environments on adaptive modulation operating in cognitive radio networks