Secure Spectrum Sensing In Cognitive Radio Sensor Networks: A Survey

The rapid growth in wireless communications has contributed to a huge demand on the deployment of new wireless services in both the licensed and unlicensed frequency spectrum. Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) is a recently emerging paradigm that aim to opportunistically access the intermittent periods of unoccupied frequency bands and therefore increasing the spectral efficiency. Unlike conventional radios, cognitive radios can intelligently adjust their transmission/reception parameters based on the interaction with the environment and find the best available spectrum bands to use. CRNs rely on cooperation for much of their functionality to make network more efficient. However, due to the distributed nature of cooperative spectrum sensing, the network is vulnerable to new types of security threats. The current spectrum sensing methods do not provide security mechanism to mitigate against these attacks. Traditional security solutions for noncognitive wireless networks do not work well when they are confronted with these new attacks. Furthermore, the security mechanisms proposed for cognitive radio ad hoc networks are not applicable for resource constrained cognitive radio sensor networks. These present considerable obstacles to development of a security mechanism that can defend against such attacks. This paper investigates threats and defense mechanism applicable for cognitive radio sensor networks to use the proposed guidelines for future development of a security mechanism for cognitive radio sensor networks