A Survey: Security Threats/Attacks in Cognitive Radio Network

The growth in wireless communication is accompanied with an increase in demand for the radio spectrum that cannot be expanded. Most of the radio spectrum has been allocated, so it becomes extremely difficult to for new services to find vacant bands. Recent studies show that static spectrum allocation policy caused poor spectrum utilization. Cognitive Radio (CR) technology had been proposed to solve the problem of spectrum scarcity and inefficient spectrum utilization. In CR technology, unlicensed secondary users can utilize the licensed frequency band when it is vacant of the primary users (PUs). Initially research in cognitive radio focused in resource allocation, spectrum sensing and management. Parallelly, the security is another important issue that attracts the attention of researchers. Due to the characteristics of cognitive radio, it is vulnerable to a class of security threats and attacks. These attacks and threats are considered as challenges in deployment of cognitive radio network (CRN) and achieving Quality of Service (QOS). This paper is a survey that discussed some of the security threats and attacks in CRN and spectrum sensing. Attacks in different layers will be explained.