A Primary User Emulation Attack Countermeasure Strategy
and Energy-Efficiency Analysis in Cognitive Radio
Networks
Yunchuan Wang, Xiaorong Xu, Weiwei Wu, and Jianrong
Bao
College of Telecommunication Engineering, Hangzhou
Dianzi
University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310018, China
Email: waynetjlg@foxmail.com;
xuxr@hdu.edu.cn;
15968138729@163.com;
baojr@hdu.edu.cn
Abstract—Due to the fact that security and energy efficiency
are investigated separately in the conventional Primary User
Emulation Attack (PUEA) countermeasure strategy in
Cooperative Spectrum Sensing (CSS) process, the tradeoff
between security and energy efficiency is discussed in this
paper. CSS can improve detection performance whereas energy
consumption will dramatically boost up with the increasing of
cooperative users. To tackle this problem, we set CSS energy
efficiency in the presence of PUEA as optimal objective,
whereas secure detection performance and secure false alarm
threshold as the constraint conditions. The optimal problem is
resolved to achieve a trade-off between energy efficiency and
security in the presence of PUEA attack. The optimal fusion
threshold K and optimal cooperative user numbers can be
obtained in secure CSS with energy efficiency maximization,
which guarantees energy efficiency as well as secure CSS
detection performance. The proposed PUEA countermeasure
strategy detection performance is presented and compared with
traditional Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) fusion rule.
Simulation results show that, the proposed strategy is immune
to PUE interference power, and it provides high robustness to
PUEA attack, which implements the trade-off between security
and energy efficiency in Cognitive Radio Network (CRN)
effectively.
Index Terms—Cooperative Spectrum Sensing (CSS), Primary
User Emulation Attack (PUEA), countermeasure strategy,
energy efficiency, detection performance
I. INTRODUCTION
Cognitive Radio (CR) is a promising technique that
enables a smart exploitation of the unused portions of the
licensed spectrum. In Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN),
Secondary User (SU) can adaptively adjust the
operational parameters (such as the transmit power,
carrier frequency and modulation method) via sensing the
external wireless environments. SU can access to the
authorized spectrum to realize dynamic spectrum sharing
Manuscript received August 3, 2016; revised January 21, 2017.
This work was supported in part by the Program of Zhejiang
Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.
LY15F010008, LZ14F010003), National Natural Science Foundation of
China (Grant No. 61471152), the Graduate Scientific Research
Foundation of Hangzhou Dianzi University in 2016 (ZX160602308035)
and Young Talent Cultivation Project of Zhejiang Association for
Science and Technology (Grant No. 2016YCGC009).
Corresponding author email: xuxr@hdu.edu.cn.
doi: 10.12720/jcm.12.1.1-7
by overlay or underlay approaches with the premise of
not affecting the authorized Primary User (PU) normal
communications. CR technology has greatly reduced the
constraints of spectrum and bandwidth for the
development of wireless technology. It has become one
of the potential key technologies in the 5G standards [1],
[2].
CRN is one of the key technologies of 5G [3],
However, CRN is an open network environment, which is
particularly vulnerable to malicious user attack. CRN not
only faces the conventional wireless network security
threats, such as eavesdropping attack, tampering data, etc
[4], [5], but also confronts with some new threats such as
PUEA [5] and Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification
(SSDF) [6]. The traditional wireless network security
problems could be mainly solved by the encryption of
transmitting signals [3], [4], [7]. However, energy
consumption was significantly increased in secure
transmission due to the complexity of encryption
algorithm and key management mechanism. Hence,
physical layer (PHY) security was regarded as
complement or substitution of conventional encryption
techniques, which had drawn much attention by network
security researchers [8]-[10]. The basic idea of PHY
security is to make use of the random feature of the noisy
channel to ensure that malicious users can not obtain
transmit message from the channel. In other words, PHY
security uses the inherent uncertainty of the noisy channel,
in order to ensure CRN data security. PHY security
considered the security from information theory and
signal processing perspectives [8], [9]. PHY security
contained two aspects. On the one hand, CRN security
capacity was theoretically analyzed from the information
theory perspective. On the other hand, secure transmit
rates to achieve security capacity was investigated from
signal processing and optimization perspective [9], [10].
However, CRN requires more on energy efficiency and
system security in the pursuit of high spectrum utilization
and high transmission efficiency. Recent research showed
that, energy consumed in spectrum sensing phase and
data transmission phase were the main energy cost in
CRN [11]. With the increasing of SU density and the
expansion of network coverage area, CRN energy
consumption problem has drawn much attention. Namely,
“Green Communications” has become one of the
of Communications Vol. 12, No. 1, January 2017
©2017 Journal of Communications
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