Joint Spectrum Sensing and Spectrum Access for Defending Massive SSDF Attacks: A Novel Defense Framework

Multiple secondary users (SUs) perform collaborative spectrum sensing (CSS) in cognitive radio networks to improve the sensing performance. However, this system severely degrades with spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attacks from a large number of malicious secondary users, i.e., massive SSDF attacks. To mitigate such attacks, we propose a joint spectrum sensing and spectrum access framework. During spectrum sensing, each SU compares the decisions of CSS and independent spectrum sensing (IndSS), and then the reliable decisions are adopted as its final decisions. Since the transmission slot is divided into several tiny slots, at the stage of spectrum access, each SU is assigned with a specific tiny time slot. In accordance with its independent final spectrum decisions, each node separately accesses the tiny time slot. Simulation results verify effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.