A cooperative spectrum sensing scheme for cognitive radio ad hoc networks based on gossip and trust

In a cognitive radio ad hoc network, secondary users must cooperate in a decentralized way in order to determine the presence or absence of the primary user. In such a setting, malicious nodes deteriorate the cooperative spectrum sensing performance by reporting incorrect sensing information to the other nodes. We classify distributed cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio ad hoc networks into two categories: consensus-based and non-consensus-based. We investigate and compare the sensitivity of these categories to spectrum sensing data falsification attacks and analyze the benefit of trust management in enhancing the performance of these methods. To this end, we introduce a novel trust-aware gossip-based scheme for distributed sensing. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly improves the cooperative sensing performance in the presence of malicious nodes in the network.