Towards addressing group selfishness of cluster-based collaborative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks

Collaborative spectrum sensing has been recognized as a promising way to ameliorate the sensing performance in cognitive radio networks. Unfortunately, it also introduces some system overhead to users, and as a result some selfish secondary users might be unwilling to contribute to collaborative spectrum sensing. In this paper, we propose a new selfishness model in cluster-based collaborative spectrum sensing, which is referred to Overclaim Selfishness (OS). An OS group may gain benefit by sharing nominally equal but actually much less sensing reports than it declares. To deal with this problem, we propose an Overclaim Selfishness Detection Scheme (OSDS) to detect the potential OS groups. We find that a single secondary user tends to have one special type of sensing reports correlated with his physical location, thus the cluster number estimated by OSDS should be no much less than the number of users the group contains. Further, we adopt an incentive scheme to stimulate rational groups to behave honestly. Finally, a real world experiment is adopted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme OSDS.