Data Security of a Cognitive Radio Network for Multicriteria Secondary Users

Abstract

Cognitive radio is a technology that has come to solve the issue of spectrum scarcity and improve spectrum utilization through its dynamic spectrum access technique. However, this technique has security issues because it allows malicious users to hack into the cognitive network and launch special attacks, such as primary user emulation attack, data tampering or denial of service attack, which can cause critical damages to the cognitive radio network. Therefore, compared with traditional networks, security in CRNs becomes a crucial and challenging problem. In this paper, we focus on dynamic radio spectrum management based on a multi-criteria algorithm to ensure the security and QoS of secondary users' usage. Our approach uses a multi-agent system based on autonomous learning and focused on a competitive cognitive environment. We evaluate the performance of the secondary user in an ideal cognitive radio system environment; We use the multiagent platform called JADE (Java Agent Development), in which we implement a program that applies the TOPSIS multi-criteria algorithm to select the best PU (primary user) among several PUs detected in the radio spectrum. Finally, we implemented a security protocol to insure both security and performance of the cognitive radio network.

Keywords

• cognitive radio networks
• spectrum management
• attacks
• security
• multi-agent systems
• multi-criteria algorithms