Primary User Emulation and Jamming Attack Detection in Cognitive Radio via Sparse Coding

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel sparse coding-based algorithm for detecting primary user emulation and jamming attacks in cognitive radio, improving detection accuracy over traditional energy detection methods.

Contribution

It proposes a new sparse coding and machine learning approach for attack detection in cognitive radio, demonstrating superior performance through extensive numerical experiments.

Findings

High success rate in attack detection

Outperforms energy detection-based methods

Validated with confusion matrix and ROC analysis

Abstract

Cognitive radio is an intelligent and adaptive radio that improves the utilization of the spectrum by its opportunistic sharing. However, it is inherently vulnerable to primary user emulation and jamming attacks that degrade the spectrum utilization. In this paper, an algorithm for the detection of primary user emulation and jamming attacks in cognitive radio is proposed. The proposed algorithm is based on the sparse coding of the compressed received signal over a channel-dependent dictionary. More specifically, the convergence patterns in sparse coding according to such a dictionary are used to distinguish between a spectrum hole, a legitimate primary user, and an emulator or a jammer. The process of decision-making is carried out as a machine learning-based classification operation. Extensive numerical experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in detecting the aforementioned attacks with high success rates. This is validated in terms of the confusion matrix quality metric. Besides, the proposed algorithm is shown to be superior to energy detection-based machine learning techniques in terms of receiver operating characteristics curves and the areas under these curves