Employing Game Theory and TDMA Protocol to Enhance Security and Manage Power Consumption in WSNs-Based Cognitive Radio

The rapid development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a significant incentive to contribute to vulnerable applications such as cognitive radio (CR). This paper proposes a Stackelberg game approach to enhance the WSN-based CR security against the spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack and conserve the consequently lost power consumption. The attack aims to corrupt the spectrum decision by imposing interference power to the delivered reports from the sensor nodes (SNs) to the fusion center (FC) to make a protection level below a specific threshold. The proposed model utilizes the intelligent Stackelberg game features along with the matched filter (MF) to maximize the number of protected reports sent by the SNs to the FC leading to an accurate decision of the spectrum status. Furthermore, the TDMA protocol is utilized to resolve the complexity of employing MF for the spectrum detection to avoid the collision between the delivered reports. The proposed model aims to enhance the number of correctly received reports at the FC, and hence manage the lost energy of reports retransmission due to the malicious attack effect. Moreover, the model can conserve the lost power of the failed communication attempts due to the SSDF attack impact. Simulation results indicate the improved performance of the proposed protection model along with the MF over six different environments against the SSDF attack as compared to two defense schemes, namely, random and equal weight defense strategies.