A Channel Difference-based PUEA Defense Method for Cooperative Cognitive Wireless Networks

In cognitive wireless networks, secondary users gain access to the spectrum by identifying and occupying primary users’ frequency resources. However, Primary User Emulation Attack (PUEA) has become a common method of attack in cognitive wireless networks. In a PUEA, malicious users try to deceive secondary users by mimicking the signals of primary users, thereby preventing them from utilizing idle frequency resources. In this paper, we propose a channel difference-based energy detection method to defend against PUEA, which takes into account the distance differences between the primary user, attacker, and secondary user. In the proposed scheme, the fusion center does not discriminate directly based on the received signal power, but rather based on the difference between the signal power received by each user and the average of all received signal powers. Closed-form expressions for the detection probability and false alarm probability of the proposed scheme are derived, and we analyze the impact of the minimum distance between the simulated primary user attacker and the secondary user, as well as the number of cooperative users, on the detection performance. Numerical results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in defending against PUEA.