Coalition based Optimization of Resource Allocation with Malicious User Detection in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio (CR) technology is an effective solution to the spectrum scarcity issue. Collaborative spectrum sensing is known as a promising technique to improve the performance of spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). However, collaborative spectrum sensing is vulnerable to spectrum data falsification (SSDF) attack, where malicious users (MUs) may send false sensing data to mislead other secondary users (SUs) to make an incorrect decision about primary user (PUs) activity, which is one of the key adversaries to the performance of CRNs. In this paper, we propose a coalition based malicious users detection (CMD) algorithm to detect the malicious user in CRNs. The proposed CMD algorithm can efficiently detect MUs base on the Geary'C theory and be modeled as a coalition formation game. Specifically, SSDF attack is one of the key issues to affect the resource allocation process. Focusing on the security issues, in this paper, we analyze the power allocation problem with MUs, and propose MUs detection based power allocation (MPA) algorithm. The MPA algorithm is divided into two steps: the MUs detection step and the optimal power allocation step. Firstly, in the MUs detection step, by the CMD algorithm we can obtain the MUs detection probability and the energy consumption of MUs detection. Secondly, in the optimal power allocation step, we use the Lagrange dual decomposition method to obtain the optimal transmission power of each SU and achieve the maximum utility of the whole CRN. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed CMD and MPA scheme can achieve a considerable performance improvement in MUs detection and power allocation. Keywords: Cognitive radio network, malicious user detection, coalition formation game, power allocation