Joint Spectrum Sensing and Resource Allocation Scheme in Cognitive Radio Networks with Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification Attack

Spectrum sensing and spectrum sharing are two fundamental issues in a cognitive radio network (CRN). The spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack imposes bad effects on both spectrum sensing and spectrum sharing. To deal with SSDF attacks and to incentivize secondary users (SUs) to behave well, a joint spectrum sensing and resource allocation (JSSRA) scheme in a CRN is proposed in this paper. The JSSRA problem is formulated as a weighted-proportional-fairness-based resource-allocation optimization problem under the constraint that the primary user (PU) network is sufficiently protected. The problem is decomposed into two subproblems, namely, the resource allocation subproblem and cooperative SU number decision subproblem, which are solved by the Lagrangian dual algorithm and the brute-force algorithm, respectively. Moreover, a user-selection method based on reinforcement learning is presented to select reliable SUs for cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS). In addition, the SU's trust degree is updated according to its behavior in CSS and is used in the sensed resource-allocation process. The key point of our proposed scheme is to make SUs improve the sensing reliability and prevent SUs from behaving maliciously by an incentive mechanism. Comprehensive performance evaluation is conducted by computer simulation. It is shown that the proposed JSSRA scheme deals with the SSDF attack well in cooperative sensing process to improve system robustness and achieves a significant system utility gain in resource allocation.