Game-theory-based analysis on interactions among secondary and malicious users in coordinated jamming attack in cognitive radio systems

TL;DR

This paper employs game theory to analyze coordinated jamming attacks in cognitive radio systems, identifying optimal strategies for secondary and malicious users to switch frequency bands and mitigate attack impacts.

Contribution

It introduces a game-theoretic model to determine optimal band-switching strategies and probabilities for secondary and malicious users in cognitive radio networks under jamming attacks.

Findings

Nash equilibrium strategies for band switching identified

Optimal switching probabilities depend on malicious user count

Model shows effectiveness of strategic switching in attack mitigation

Abstract

IEEE 802.22 standard utilizes cognitive radio (CR) techniques to allow sharing unused spectrum band. The cognitive radio is vulnerable to various attacks such as jamming attacks. This paper has focused on coordinated jamming attacks. A simple strategy for secondary users is to change their bands and switch to other appropriate bands when the jamming attack is occurred. Also, the malicious users should switch to other bands in order to jam the secondary users. To address this problem, a game theoretical method is proposed to analyze coordinated jamming attacks in CR. Then, using Nash equilibrium on the proposed game, the most appropriate bands have been found to switch as well as the optimal switching probabilities for both secondary and malicious users. Meanwhile, effects of different parameters like the number of malicious users are investigated in changing the optimal switching probabilities by analysis on the model.