Secure Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Strategy Based on Reputation Mechanism for Cognitive Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Cooperative spectrum sensing can be regarded as a promising method to resolve the spectrum scarcity owing to achieving spatial diversity gain in cognitive radio sensor networks. However, the spectrum sensing data falsification attack launched by the malicious nodes will result in the wrong decision in the fusion center owing to the falsified observations. It will cause a serious security threat and degrade the decision making process. In this paper, we propose a secure cooperative spectrum sensing strategy based on reputation mechanism for cognitive wireless sensor networks to counter above kind of attack. The beta reputation model is applied to assign reputation value to cognitive sensor nodes according to their historical sensing behavior, and a dynamic trust evaluation scheme of cooperative spectrum sensing is established. In the final decision, the fusion center allocates a reasonable weight value according to the evaluation of the submitted observations to improve the accuracy of the sensing results. Simulation results support that our proposed strategy can weaken the impact of sensing data falsification attacks in cooperative sensing and outperform some traditional methods.

Keywords

• Cooperative spectrum sensing
• reputation mechanism
• cognitive wireless sensor networks
• cognitive radio