Cognisseum: Cognitive radios on Colosseum facing adversaries

Cognitive radio technology brings a lot of interesting features which affect the transmission and reception properties of modern communication devices. Dynamic spectrum sensing, channel hopping and allocation, and software-based control are among the many. The new features allow strategic defense mechanisms while also enabling more capable adversarial attacks. In this work, we study coalitions of secondary users (SUs) against adversaries. In the presence of primary users (PUs), we inspect the behavior of SU pairs in cognitive radio networks, before and after adversarial attacks. We propose algorithms for forming coalitions among SU pairs. We consider two attack strategies for the adversaries: smart or naïve. We study how the channels are allocated if there is an attack and how the payoffs of those SU pairs vary with varying number of channels. We also show the effects of attack from the attackers’ point-of-view and how the attack strategy changes if the adversaries act smart vs. naïve. Using Colosseum, a large-scale wireless channel emulator, we construct a functional cognitive radio network and use its software-defined radio (SDR) hardware as SU and adversarial nodes. Using this setup, we run experiments and record data by running network performance measurement tool iPerf3 for various coalitional setups.