NEAT: A NEighbor AssisTed Spectrum Decision Protocol for Resilience against Primary User Emulation Attacks

We propose a distributed spectrum decision protocol resilient to primary user emulation attacks (PUEA) in dynamic spectrum access (DSA) networks. PUEA is a type of denialof-service attack that can result in unreliable and/or disconnected DSA networks by depriving legitimate secondary users of spectrum access. We first propose an individual detection mechanism for secondary users to achieve preliminary sensing results. For this, we characterize the received power at a good secondary user, using a flexible log-normal sum approximation. We then develop a distributed spectrum decision protocol in which secondary users exchange individual sensing results with their one-hop neighbors to increase resilience to PUEA. We call this protocol NEAT: NEighbor AssisTed spectrum decision protocol. We provide mathematical analysis of this protocol in terms of both the probability of successful PUEA as well as the probability of missing the primary, under Byzantine attacks – when the malicious users also lie about PUEA with some probability. We then compare the performance of the proposed protocol to the majority logic rule. We show that with negligible communication overhead, the proposed protocol reduces the probability of successful PUEA by 52%-100% in the presence of Byzantine attacks, while still following the spectrum evacuation etiquette.