Effective Secured Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio Channels

To cope with the recent reality of stringent shortage in frequency spectrum due to the proliferation of wireless services, cognitive radio has been considered as an attractive technique to improve spectrum utilization for future wireless systems. In such an environment, secondary user opportunistically accesses the spectrum which requires efficient spectrum sensing technique to ensure a good service to both primary and secondary users. Many methods are proposed in the literature in the area of spectrum sensing. However the performance of these methods deteriorates if proper information of the primary user channels is not available. Security issues in cognitive radio networks are attracting more and more studies in recent years. The success of cognitive radio networks, however strongly depends on counteracting such potential security attacks and threats. Primary user emulation attack (PUEA) is one of such serious attacks. Hence this paper proposes an algorithm called „blind‟ spectrum sensing based defense strategy which performs even when the noise variance is uncertain or unknown. This paper proposes a scheme to characterize an advanced primary user emulation attack and an advanced countermeasure against it.