A jammer-resilient cognitive radio network using evolutionary game theory

Abstract

Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) is an emerging technology that holds promises for solving the wireless spectrum scarcity problem by allowing secondary users (SU), also called unlicensed users, to coexist with primary user (PU), also called licensed users, without causing any interference to the PU's communication. However, similar to any networking technology, CRNs are susceptible to many attacks, one of which is the jamming attack. A jamming attack can be referred to as an intentional interference attack on wireless channels with an intent to either interfere with the transmissions of SUs or to gain access to the channel for selfish utilization of the channel. This paper presents an evolutionary game theoretic approach to mitigate such a jamming attack. The proposed evolutionary game helps normal secondary users gain fair utilization of channels even though a malicious SU (jammer) could be present in those channels. Results obtained from this study establishes the fact that the proposed algorithm works.