Improving performance of CSS cognitive radio networks under jamming attack

Cognitive radio (CR) sense the spectrum to discover the available white spaces in it for making better utilization of spectrum and alleviates the spectrum shortage problem. While using the available spectrum, it avoids the harmful interference with licensed users or primary users (PUs). Individual spectrum sensing by CR may not be accurate due to fading and shadowing effects. Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) ensures more accuracy in sensing the spectrum as it exploits the cooperation among multiple secondary users (SUs) or CRs. However, CSS is more vulnerable to security threats and attacks which degrades the network performance. In this paper, we consider the jamming attack in CSS by CRs and identify the attacker or malicious user (MU) to improve the network performance. In jamming attack, attacker jams the communication channels by continuously sending the bogus signals there by preventing the other SUs from using the channels leading to denial of service attack. The results shows that the network performance does not degrade under jamming attack as the proposed protocol detects and eliminates the attacker.