Robustness against Byzantine Failures in Distributed Spectrum Sensing

Distributed spectrum sensing (DSS) enables a Cognitive Radio (CR) network to reliably detect licensed users and avoid causing interference to licensed communications. The data fusion technique is a key component of DSS. We discuss the Byzantine failure problem in the context of data fusion, which may be caused by either malfunctioning sensing terminals or Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification (SSDF) attacks. In either case, incorrect spectrum sensing data is reported to a data collector which can lead to the distortion of data fusion outputs. We investigate various data fusion techniques, focusing on their robustness against Byzantine failures. In contrast to existing data fusion techniques that use a fixed number of samples, we propose a new technique that uses a variable number of samples. The proposed technique, which we call Weighted Sequential Probability Ratio Test (WSPRT), introduces a reputation-based mechanism to the Sequential Probability Ratio Test (SPRT). We evaluate WSPRT by comparing it with a variety of data fusion techniques under various conditions. We also discuss practical issues that need to be considered when applying the fusion techniques to CR networks. Our simulation results indicate that WSPRT is the most robust against Byzantine failures among the data fusion techniques that were considered.