Subband PUEA Detection and Mitigation in OFDM-Based Cognitive Radio Networks

This paper considers malicious user detection and energy harvesting in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-based cognitive radio networks under primary user emulation attack (PUEA). The digital TV (DTV) model adopted is the second generation terrestrial digital television standard (DVB-T2). In this paper, first, we propose an efficient advanced encryption standard (AES)-based DTV scheme, where the existing reference sequence used to generate the P2 pilot symbols in the DVB-T2 frames is encrypted using the AES algorithm to facilitate accurate primary user and malicious user detection. With the proposed scheme, we can detect PUEA accurately over all subcarriers or subbands where the P2 symbols present. Second, we come up with an effective communication scheme for the secondary users (SUs) under PUEA by exploiting the energy harvesting techniques. Optimal power splitting is considered for sum-rate maximization. As the optimal solution relies on multidimensional exhaustive search, we propose an effective suboptimal solution with much lower computational complexity. It is observed that the sum-rate of the SU network can be improved significantly with the energy harvesting technique. Third, we evaluate the worst case PUEA interference in terms of minimizing the sum-rate for the SUs. We show that for practical systems, as channel state information among the SUs is not available to the malicious user, the worst jamming for the SUs is when the malicious user performs equal power allocation over all the white space subcarriers. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the proposed approaches.