A Transfer Games Actor–Critic Learning Framework for Anti-Jamming in Multi-Channel Cognitive Radio Networks

A cognitive radio network (CRN) is a novel solution that promises to solve the spectrum scarcity problem and enhance spectrum utilization. However, unsecured CRN can easily be manipulated in order to attack legacy users on the communication channel. As a result, the network's performance significantly degrades. Therefore, communication channel security is an important issue that needs to be addressed in a CRN. In this work, we focus on improving the security of multi-channel communication in a CRN, while various jammers try to access channels of interest to prevent SUs from using them. By using game-theoretic concepts and by defining states, actions, and players' rewards, we propose game-based schemes that find the best channel for the secondary users (SUs) in order to avoid jammer's attacks on communication channels. Accordingly, the problem is finding the optimal channel to maximize the long-term reward of the SU where communication channels are not used by the primary users (PUs) and are not jammed by attackers. In addition, the idea of transfer learning might be applied to the problem under consideration, and thus, a transfer Game-Actor-Critic (TGACT) scheme is proposed, which uses the transferred knowledge in a double-game period to accelerate the learning process and provide performance improvement in channel selection. Finally, the performance of the proposed schemes is simulated with different configurations. The simulation results show that the proposed schemes are quite resistant to jammer attacks, and achieve better performance compared to other channel selection schemes.