Cooperative Spectrum Sensing with Trust Assistance for Cognitive Radio Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

As Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) attract a lot of research attention, VANETs with Cognitive Radio (CR-VANETs) are also studied as supplement and enhancement of VANETs, which are used to solve the issues of spectrum shortage in VANETs. With this CR technology, VANETs can satisfy more bandwidth demanding for amounts of applications based on communication between vehicles. Cooperative spectrum sensing is naturally suitable for CR-VANETs due to its autonomous characteristic. Cooperative spectrum sensing opens a door for malicious attacks in spectrum sensing. It assumes that every vehicle in the network is always honest and benign. However, the security attacks exist in all kinds of networks. Thus, solving this security issue becomes critical for CR-VANETs, which are using cooperative spectrum sensing. In this paper, a distributed cooperative spectrum sensing scheme is proposed to solve the security issue in CR-VANETs. In this scheme, a weighted consensus-based spectrum sensing algorithm with trust assistance is used to protect the spectrum sensing process in a hostile CR-VANET. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is validated by extensive simulations.