Exploiting Context-Awareness for Secure Spectrum Trading in Multi-hop Cognitive Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a context-aware routing protocol for multi-hop cognitive networks that improves security and reliability by optimizing route selection based on QoS, security metrics, and resource trading.

Contribution

It presents a novel context-aware route discovery protocol and security metrics specifically designed for secure spectrum trading in cognitive cellular networks.

Findings

Achieves 90% link reliability with 4 channels under traffic imbalance

Secure throughput reaches 99% in the secondary network

Resource requirements vary with relay reputation from 0.5 to 0.9

Abstract

In this paper, we consider context-awareness to enhance route reliability and robustness in multi-hop cognitive networks. A novel context-aware route discovery protocol is presented to enable secondary users to select the route according to their QoS requirements. The protocol facilitates adjacent relay selection under different criteria, such as shortest available path, route reliability and relay reputation. New routing and security-based metrics are defined to measure route robustness in spatial, frequency and temporal domains. Secure throughput, defined as the percentage of traffic not being intercepted in the network, is provided. The resources needed for trading are then obtained by jointly optimizing secure throughput and trading price. Simulation results show that when there is a traffic imbalance of factor 4 between the primary and secondary networks, 4 channels are needed to achieve 90% link reliability and 99% secure throughput in the secondary network. Besides, when relay reputation varies from 0.5 to 0.9, a 20% variation in the required resources is observed.