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

Common Control Channel Allocation in Cognitive Radio Networks through UWB Communication

The implementation of a common control channel is one of the most challenging issues in cognitive radio networks, since a fully reliable control channel cannot be created without reserving bandwidth specifically for this purpose. In this paper, we investigate a promising solution that exploits the Ultra Wide Band (UWB) technology to let cognitive radio nodes discover each other and exchange control information for establishing a communication link. The contribution of this paper is threefold: (i) we define the communication protocol needed to let cognitive radio nodes discover each other and exchange control information for link set up, (ii) we overcome the gap in coverage, which typically exists between UWB and long-medium range technolo- gies, by using multi-hop communication, (iii) we evaluate the performance of our approach by adopting an accurate channel model and show its benefits with respect to an in-band signalling solutio

An Adaptive Common Control Channel MAC with Transmission Opportunity in IEEE 802.11ac

Spectral utilization is a major challenge in wireless ad hoc networks due in part to using limited network resources. For ad hoc networks, the bandwidth is shared among stations that can transmit data at any point in time. It  is important to maximize the throughput to enhance the network service. In this paper, we propose an adaptive multi-channel access with transmission opportunity protocol for multi-channel ad hoc networks, called AMCA-TXOP. For the purpose of coordination, the proposed protocol uses an adaptive common control channel over which the stations negotiate their channel selection based on the entire available bandwidth and then switch to the negotiated channel. AMCA-TXOP requires a single radio interface so that each station can listen to the control channel, which can overhear all agreements made by the other stations. This allows parallel transmission to multiple stations over various channels, prioritizing data traffic to achieve the quality-of-service requirements. The proposed approach can work with the 802.11ac protocol, which has expanded the bandwidth to 160 MHz by channel bonding. Simulations were conducted to demonstrate the throughput gains that can be achieved using the AMCA-TXOP protocol. Moreover, we compared our protocol with  the IEEE 802.11ac standard protocols

An analysis on decentralized adaptive MAC protocols for Cognitive Radio networks

The scarcity of bandwidth in the radio spectrum has become more vital since the demand for more and more wireless applications has increased. Most of the spectrum bands have been allocated although many studies have shown that these bands are significantly underutilized most of the time. The problem of unavailability of spectrum and inefficiency in its utilization has been smartly addressed by the Cognitive Radio (CR) Technology which is an opportunistic network that senses the environment, observes the network changes, and then using knowledge gained from the prior interaction with the network, makes intelligent decisions by dynamically adapting their transmission characteristics. In this paper some of the decentralized adaptive MAC protocols for CR networks have been critically analyzed and a novel adaptive MAC protocol for CR networks, DNG-MAC which is decentralized and non-global in nature, has been proposed. The results show the DNG-MAC out performs other CR MAC protocols in terms of time and energy efficiency

Cognitive wireless mesh network without common control channel evaluated in NS-3

The CPqD Cognitive Mesh Network (CCMN) has been developed with traditional cognition elements, such as energy detection based sensing and with the ability to switch the data channel to take advantage of any available channels on a given radio-electric spectrum band. Many of the solutions that utilize cognitive mesh networks are based on the fact that it uses a common control channel (CCC) to manage the system. Therefore the Multi-Channel - One Interface Manager (MC-OIM) alg orithm was developed to maximize channel usage with a system that does not depend of any CCC . The MC-OIM algorithm was evaluated using network simulator ns-3 and simulation results were validated with testes that were done in a real scenario