See

discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/281629766

Effects of Malicious Users on the Energy

Efficiency of Cognitive Radio Networks
CONFERENCE PAPER SEPTEMBER 2015
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.2230.3205

CITATION

READS

70

3 AUTHORS:
Efe Orumwense

Thomas Afullo

University of KwaZulu-Natal

University of KwaZulu-Natal

6 PUBLICATIONS 5 CITATIONS

79 PUBLICATIONS 178 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

SEE PROFILE

Viranjay Srivastava
University of KwaZulu-Natal
45 PUBLICATIONS 105 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE

All in-text references underlined in blue are linked to publications on ResearchGate,

letting you access and read them immediately.

Available from: Efe Orumwense

Retrieved on: 28 December 2015

Effects of Malicious Users on the Energy Efficiency of

Cognitive Radio Networks
Efe F. Orumwense1, Thomas J. Afullo2, Viranjay M. Srivastava3
School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering,
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 4041, South Africa.
1

efe.orumwense@gmail.com
2
Afullot@ukzn.ac.za
3
viranjay@ieee.org

Abstract Multiple Cognitive Radio Users (CRUs) perform

local spectrum sensing independently and makes a binary
decision about the spectrum occupancy. The binary decision is
forwarded to a Fusion Center (FC) for fusion which leads to
more accurate detection of licensed signals in the network. Some
malicious users in the network may affect the decisions of other
legitimate CRUs by sending wrong spectrum occupancy
information to the FC so as to use the spectral band for their
own selfish gain, a term known as Primary User Emulation
Attack (PUEA). In this paper, the effect of malicious users on
the energy efficiency of cognitive radio networks is examined. A
secured energy detection cooperative spectrum sensing
technique is proposed and analysed to help maximize energy
efficiency and reduce the effects of these attacks on the network.
Simulation results show that there is a decrease in the energy
efficiency of the network when the malicious users increases, and
also that our proposed secured Cooperative Spectrum Sensing
(CSS) technique in the OR fusion rule provides better energy
efficiency.
Keywords Cognitive Radio Networks, Energy Efficiency,
Malicious Users, Primary User Emulation Attacks, Fusion Rule.

I. INTRODUCTION
With the recent advances in wireless communication
technology, Cognitive Radio (CR) has gradually paved its
way into modern day technology becoming more popular by
the day and evolving to become an alluring and attractive
solution to spectral congestion and shortage problems [1]. In
a Cognitive Radio Network (CRN), a Cognitive Radio User
(CRU) or unlicensed user can opportunistically use an unused
portion of spectrum belonging to a licensed user without a
license. In order to avoid interference with the licensed user
during this process, the CRU should have a prior knowledge
about the status of the spectrum, either it is being used or
vacant before using it. This prior knowledge about the status
of the spectrum is gained through a process called spectrum
sensing [2].
In a spectrum sensing process, each unlicensed user is
equipped with cognitive radio to detect a targeted licensed
spectrum and logically decide if the spectrum is free or
vacant. In the vein to enhancing the performance of the
process, multiple CRU can effectively cooperate with each
other to conduct spectrum sensing, a term in literature
commonly known as Cooperative Spectrum Sensing (CSS)
[3] [4]. Cooperative spectrum sensing allows each cognitive
radio to perform local spectrum sensing independently and
then makes a binary decision and forwards this decision to a

Page 431

Fusion Center (FC). The FC gathers the local sensing

information and makes a final decision about the availability
of the spectral band. It has been seen that with the
introduction of cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive
radio networks, the effects of multi-path fading and
shadowing experienced by CRUs are mitigated and the
performance of spectrum sensing has greatly improved with a
more accurate detection of licensed user signals [5].
CSS, however, is vulnerable to some misbehaving CRUs
which disrupt the network and the spectrum sensing etiquette
and the obtainable overall performance. The misbehaviour is
caused by reporting false spectrum occupancy information in
order to influence the final decision made by the FC. A
malicious CRU usually sends information that the spectrum is
used to the FC which helps to identify the spectrum as used in
taking the final decision. The resultant effect of this is that
other CRUs will identify the malicious CRU as a licensed
user thereby vacating the occupied spectrum band for the
malicious CRU believing it is a licensed user. This gives the
malicious user an unrivalled access to the spectrum [6].
An attack in the cooperative spectrum sensing process of a
cognitive radio network in which malicious users pretends to
be a licensed user by sending false spectrum occupancy
information in order to gain unrivalled access to a vacant
spectrum is called Primary User Emulation Attacks (PUEA)
[6]. One of the possible approaches in preventing PUEA in
the network is to build a secure link between CRUs and FC in
order to be sure that only authenticated spectrum sensing
occupancy results obtained from a trusted CRU is accepted by
the FC in making its final decisions. In order to build a
secured link, authentication, integrity and accurate spectrum
sensing mechanism, are taken into consideration. The
spectrum sensing mechanism used must be able to accurately
detect vacant spectrum bands. The FC receiving the spectrum
occupancy information should be able to attest that
information is coming from a legitimate CRU (authentication)
and also that the information was not modified or changed in
transit (integrity). Due to the large overhead required in most
spectrum sensing mechanisms, previous works on this aspect
are mainly based on licensed user detection techniques and
intrusion
detection
techniques
with
cryptographic
mechanisms. In [7], an authentication of the licensed users
signal using cryptographic and wireless link signatures via a
helper node which is usually placed in close proximity to the
primary user is used. Chen et al [8], have investigated a
cooperative spectrum sensing scenario in the presence of a

Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC) 2015

PUEA using optimal weights to maximize the detection

probability. Althunibat et al [9] have also proposed an
approach that tackles security in the cooperative spectrum
sensing process of a cognitive radio with respect to energy
efficiency by using a low-overhead symmetric cryptographic
mechanism which produces a message authentication code
that authenticates spectrum occupancy information sent by
CRUs. In [10], a collaborative spectrum sensing protocol was
proposed to improve the energy efficiency of the network by
reducing the number of sensing reports from the secondary
users to the fusion center. The relative trustworthiness of a
user in a cognitive radio network is also evaluated in [11]
where the authors proposed a method in verifying if the
source of spectrum occupancy information is from a
legitimate user.
In this paper, we have analyzed the effects of malicious
CRUs on the detection accuracy of cooperative spectrum
sensing process and the achievable energy efficiency by the
legitimate CRU. We present that these effects depend mainly
on the number of malicious users in the network and the type
of Fusion Rule (FR) employed by the spectrum sensing
process in making the final decision on the spectrum
utilization. The contributions of this paper extend to propose
an improved energy detection mechanism that reduces the
effects of malicious users on the energy efficiency of
cognitive radio network using an improved energy detection
based cooperative spectrum sensing mechanism that
maximizes the energy efficiency of the network.
The organisation of the paper is structured as follows,
Section II presents a system model of a cognitive radio
network and the resulting effect of malicious users on the
detection performance is also formulated. The proposed
energy detection based cooperative spectrum sensing
mechanism is presented in section III. Simulation results
obtained are presented and discussed in Section IV. Finally,
sections V conclude the work and recommend future works.

CRU detects a licensed user signal, otherwise the spectrum

band is regarded as vacant. In the AND rule, the spectrum
band is declared busy by the FC only when all the CRU
detect the licensed user signal, otherwise the band is regarded
as vacant.
However, there are some CRUs that do not normally
follow the spectrum sensing etiquette and therefore
downgrade the overall performance of the considered CRN.
These users are referred to as malicious CRUs. What the
malicious user does for its own self gain is to always report a
spectrum sensing decision of 1 so that the decision of the FC
can be influenced. This however increases the probability of
the FC in taking a final decision of 1 and therefore, none of
the legitimate CRUs will use the spectrum. The malicious
user then uses the spectrum for its transmission. We consider
the number of malicious user to be so that the total number
of CRUs in the network, both legitimate and malicious
becomes
.
In a CSS environment, the probability of detection ( )
and the probability of false alarm ( ) are used to measure
the local performance of the CRUs in the network.
Probability of detection is the probability of identifying a
used channel as used while the probability of false alarm is
the probability of identifying a vacant channel as used. The
overall performance of CSS is also measured in a similar
manner by the FC using the local spectrum decisions sent by
the CRUs.
The probability of detection and the probability of false alarm
employing the OR fusion rule in terms of M and N can be
expressed as

( )

( ) (

(1)

(2)

The probability of detection and the probability of false alarm

II. SYSTEM MODEL
employing the AND fusion rule in terms of M and N can also
Consider a system with
number of CRUs trying to be expressed as
access a licensed spectrum band in a cognitive radio network
environment. The probability that the spectrum is not being

( ) ( )
(
)
(3)
{
used by a licensed user is denoted by
. To avoid
interference, each CRU senses a specific spectrum at a
* +
specific time and takes a local binary decision
( ) ( )
about the availability of the spectrum. If the decision
(
)
(4)
{
is taken then the CRU decides that the spectrum is being used.
If otherwise, then the CRU decides that the spectrum is
vacant.
where is a predefined threshold on the number of CRUs
who detect a user on the spectrum.
is the probability of
After a local binary decision have been taken by all the detection for each individual CRU. In equation (1) and (2),
CRUs and sent to the FC, the FC receives these decisions and
when
, the final decision will be 1 since the FC will
fuses them by using specific fusion rules (FR) to make a final
always receive a number of 1s larger than or equal to K
decision. There are many fusion rules that can be applied at
reported by the malicious users. But when
, the lower
the FR [12]. In this work, we will be focusing on the logic OR
bound summation will be decreased by .
rule and the logic AND rule because in these rules, given a
and
are the probability of detection and false alarm
targeted probability of detection or a targeted probability of
respectively
in the local spectrum sensing process of any of
false alarm, each CRU threshold can be derived. In OR rule,
the FC will declare the spectrum busy when at least one of the

Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC) 2015

Page 432

the th CRU in the cognitive radio network. This can be

expressed as
(

),

),

(6)

where
indicates that th CRU has decided that a licensed
signal is present,
and
indicates the presence and
absence of a licensed user signal respectively.
The effect of malicious users on the overall performance
of the network can be seen in
and . An increase in
creates a more efficient network while a decrease in
degrades the efficient usage of the unused spectrum. In
formulating the effects of malicious users on the networks
resources, we define Energy efficiency metric ( ) as the ratio
of the total successfully transmitted bits to the total number of
energy consumed by the legitimate CRUs. Data can only be
successfully transmitted if the spectrum is vacant and no false
alarm is reported, which results to non-zero efficiency.
The average energy efficiency ( ) can be expressed as
(

(7)

) represents the probability of no

where the factor (
false alarm case, represents the data rate in
, is the
transmitted time,
is the energy consumed by all the
legitimate CRUs during sensing and
is the energy
transmitted by the scheduled CRU. From equation (7), an
increase in the false alarm probability will lead to a decrease
in the amount of successfully transmitted data which on the
other hand lowers the energy efficiency.
III. SECURE ENERGY DETECTION BASED COOPERATIVE
SPECTRUM SENSING

In order to reduce the effects of malicious users on a

CRN, it is imperative to build a secured CSS which will help
to increase the energy efficiency of the system. This section
presents an energy efficient cooperative spectrum sensing
method which also helps to increase the detection of licensed
signals in the targeted spectrum band.
Since a malicious user is present in the system to always
report the presence of a licensed signal where there is actually
none, then fake signals will be sent by a PUEA and received
by other legitimate CRUs under
only. So in the event of
an attacker, only the probability of false alarm
will be
affected. So involving the presence or absence of an attacker
and
respectively in equation (6), we then have
(

) (

) (

),

(8)

) and (
) are conditional probabilities
where (
regarding the presence and absence of fake PUEA attacker
signals which are related to the attacker strategy. Considering
(
) and (
) as constant values, for simplicity
of notations, we can denote is as

Page 433

(9)

(10)

(5)

and
(

(
and
(

where
denotes the presence of an attacker. We can
therefore rewrite equation (8) as
(

)(

(11)

A. Energy Detection Based Spectrum Sensing Technique

Energy detection sensing technique is very popular in
cooperative spectrum sensing due to its simplicity and no
requirement on a prior knowledge of the licensed user signal
[13]. A local spectrum sensing is performed by the all the
CRUs, both legitimate and malicious (
). It is assumed
that every CRUs adopts the energy detection technique in
which G samples of the energy
are summed up during a
detection interval,

(12)

is compared to a threshold which every CRUs decides

locally about the presence and absence of a licensed user
signal. The probability of detection and the probability of
false alarm for an th CRU in energy detection can be written
as:
(
| ),
(13)
(

),

(14)

where is the threshold used in energy detector of the th

CRU. Based on equation (12), in energy detection is sum
of
squared of the CRU received signal.
is Gaussian
random variable with zero mean and variance
under ,
*
+. So will be compliant with the central Chisquare ( ) distribution with 2 degrees of freedom and
parameter
.

(
(
(

)
)
)

+
*
*

+
+

(15)

where is the possible outcome of the presence of a licensed

user signal, is the presence of a PUEA signal and is the
presence of none of the signals. In determining the analyzed
cooperative spectrum sensing method used, we employ
Neyman-Pearson criterion [14] to determine the probability of
detection using energy detection based cooperative spectrum
sensing. Neyman-Pearson technique provides a threshold for
detection subject to a constant probability of false alarm .
)
Based on equation (8), we need the values of (
|
), which can be written in energy detection
and (
|
as
(

)
)

Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC) 2015

(16)
(17)

TABLE I
PARAMETERS USED FOR SIMULATION

So we can now rewrite

in equation (5) energy detection
based cooperative spectrum sensing as

Parameter
(

Value

0.5
0.8

( )

(18)

0.2
0.3s

where ( ) and ( ) are Gamma function and upper

incomplete Gamma function [15], respectively. Equation (11)
can also be written as
(

( )

( )

(19)
3000

( )

(20)

( )

(21)

( )

(22)

( )

(23)

2500
Energy Efficiency. (Bit/Joule)

In Neyman-Pearson criterion, it is shown that for a given

probability of false alarm, the optimal threshold which
maximizes the probability of detection can be obtained if the
given probability of false alarm is the actual considered
probability of false alarm.
The probability of detection
and the probability of false
alarm
based on our method for both the OR and AND
fusion rules are reformulated respectively, as follows

2000

1500

1000

500
1

3
4
5
Number of malicious users(M)

Fig. 1. The achievable energy efficiency ( ) against the number of

malicious users in a cognitive radio networkfor the normal and
proposed secured CSS algorithm.

where
(
) and
(
) can easily be obtained by
replacing by in equation (1) (4) respectively.
By the same way, the achievable energy efficiency in our
proposed secure CSS (
) can be updated as follows
(

Proposed Secured Algorithm (AND Rule)

Normal CSS Algorithm
Proposed Secured Algorithm (OR Rule)

3500

(24)

where
, is the energy consumed by one
CRU during the local spectrum sensing and is the energy
required to report its one bit spectrum occupancy information
to the FC.
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
We have implemented the simulations on a cognitive
radio network consisting of 10 legitimate users ( ) . The
simulation parameters used as regards the energy efficiency
and network specifications are given in Table 1.

Energy Efficiency. (Bit/Joule)

3000

2500

OR Fusion Rule
AND Fusion Rule

2000

1500

1000

500

0.1

0.2

0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
Probability of false alarm (Pfa)

0.7

0.8

Fig. 2. The achievable energy efficiency ( ) against the probability

of false alarm in a cognitive network for the proposed secured CSS
algorithm in the OR and AND Fusion rules.

Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC) 2015

Page 434

0.9

Fig. 1 shows the effects of malicious users on the energy

efficiency of a cognitive radio network. The attainable energy
efficiency is plotted against the number of malicious users in
the system. It is evident that as the malicious users continue
to increase in the network, the energy efficiency decreases.
Observe that there is higher energy efficiency with the
proposed energy detection based cooperative spectrum
sensing technique in both the AND and OR fusion rules than
the normal cooperative spectrum sensing technique. That is to
say that there is an improvement in the energy efficiency
achieved by the proposed secure algorithm in both rules over
the normal cooperative spectrum sensing protocol.

[5]

The results in Fig. 2 shows the performance of the OR and

AND fusion rules of the proposed secured energy detection
based cooperative spectrum sensing technique. The energy
efficiency achieved is plotted against the probability of false
alarm. As the probability of false alarm increases, the energy
efficiency of the network also decreases. The increase in the
probability of false alarm is caused by malicious CRUs taking
wrong spectrum occupancy decisions thereby affecting the
number of legitimate users in the network. The result shows
that there is a better performance of the OR fusion rule over
the AND fusion rule.

[9]

V. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS

Primary User Emulation Attacks (PUEA) populates a
cognitive radio network with malicious users which affect the
energy efficiency of the network. In this paper, the effect of
these malicious users on the network is studied. A secured
energy detection based cooperative spectrum sensing
technique is proposed to boost the security of the spectrum
sensing process of CRUs in the network where the final
decision about a spectrum occupancy is taken by a Fusion
Center (FC) employing Fusion Rules (FR). The simulation
results show that malicious users has a great impact on the
energy efficiency of the network and our proposed secure
CSS algorithm has a significant improvement on the
attainable energy efficiency when compared to the normal
CSS algorithm. Also from the two fusion rules employed by
the FC, the OR fusion rule yields more energy efficiency than
the AND fusion rule. In future work, the effects of imperfect
reporting and sensing channels on the energy efficiency of the
network will be investigated.

[6]

[7]

[8]

[10]

[11]

[12]

[13]

[14]

[15]

A. Ghasemi and E. S. Sousa, Collaborative spectrum sensing for

opportunistic access in fading environments, in Proceedings IEEE
Symp. New Frontiers in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks
(DySPAN05), Baltimore, USA, pp. 131-136. November,, 2005.
E. Orumwense, O. Oyerinde, and S. Mneney, Impact of primary user
emulation attacks on cognitive radio networks, International Journal
on Communications Antenna and Propagation, Vol. 4, pp. 19 26.
April, 2014.
Y. Liu, P. Ning, H. Dai, Authenticating Primary Users Signals in
Cognitive Radio 1209 networks via integrated cryptographic and
wireless link signatures, in Proceedings Of IEEE Symposium on
Security and Privacy, California, USA, pp. 286301, May, 2010.
C. Chen, H. Cheng, Y-D. Yao, Cooperative spectrum sensing in
cognitive radio networks in the presence of the primary user emulation
attack, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. vol. 10. pp.
2135-2141. 2011.
S. Althunibat, V. Sucasas, H. Marques and J. Rodriquez On the trade
off between security and energy efficiency in cooperative spectrum
sensing for cognitive radio. IEEE Communication Letters vol. 17, no.
8, pp. 1564-1567. July 2013.
S. Mousavifar and C. Leung, Energy efficient collaborative spectrum
sensing based on trust management in cognitive radio networks
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. vol. 14, pp. 1927 1939. 2015.
E. Orumwense, O. Oyerinde and S. Mneney, Improving
trustworthiness amongst nodes in cognitive radio networks
Proceedings of the Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and
Applications Conference (SATNAC), Eastern Cape, South Africa. pp.
401-406. August 2014.
S. Kyperountas, N. Correal, and Q. Shi A Comparison of Fusion
Rules for Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Fading Channels. EMS
Research, Motorola.
I. Akyildiz, B. Lo, and R. Balakrishnan, Cooperative spectrum
sensing in cognitive radio networks: a survey Journal on Physical
Communications. vol. 11. pp. 40-62. 2011.
Z. Yuan, D. Niyato, H. Li, and Z. Han, Defense against primary user
emulation attacks using belief propagation of location information in
cognitive radio networks, in proceedings of the IEEE Wireless
Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC). Hong Kong,.
pp. 599-604. March, 2011.
Gradshteyn and I. Ryzhik, Table of integrals, series and products, 6th
edition. New York. Academic Press, 2000.

Efe Francis Orumwense received his B.Sc (Hons) degree from the
School of Engineering, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria in
2009. He also received a Masters degree from the School of
Electrical Electronic and Computer Engineering, University of
KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa in 2014. He is currently
working towards a PhD from the same institution. His research
interest includes Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
systems, cognitive radio technology, wireless network security and
energy efficiency systems.

REFERENCES
[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

J. Mitola and G. Q. Maguire, Cognitive radio: Making software radios

more personal IEEE Personal Communications, vol. 6, no 4, pp. 1318, August 1999.
S. M. Mishra, A. Sahai, and R. Brodersen, Cooperative sensing
among cognitive radios, in Proceedings IEEE International
Conference in Communications. Istanbul, Turkey. June 2006. vol. 4,
pp. 1658-1663.
K. B. Letaief, and W. Zhang, Cooperative communications for
cognitive radio networks,in Proceedings of the IEEE Journal, vol. 97.
2009. pp. 878-893.
Y. Zou, Y.D Yao and B. Zheng, Cooperative relay techniques for
cognitive radio systems: Spectrum sensing and secondary user
transmissions IEEE Communication Magazines, vol. 50, no. 4, pp.
98-103, April, 2012.

Page 435

Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC) 2015