Improvement of a secure and Distributed Cooperative Spectrum Sensing protocol

Spectrum sensing is very important and plays a vital role in Cognitive Radio Networks. The system needs to find white spaces or spectrum holes which are the portions in the spectrum not being used by the rightful user. As there is a severe dearth of the spectrum, sensing the spectrum when not in use forms the core functionality of the Cognitive Radio. Good performance is obtained even in the presence of hidden node, fading and shadowing environment by the use of Collaborative spectrum sensing. The price to be paid is paving the way for the malicious users to get into the system and negate the decisions regarding the spectrum. The falsification of the sensing reports is done by the dishonest users for the selfish use of the spectrum or making the spectrum unavailable. A secure protocol is the need to overcome this problem where the information sent by all the nodes is considered and final decision is made about the presence of the licensed user. In this paper, it is analyzed that the protocol merges the reports in the presence of the malicious and trusted nodes. An improvement is shown as it reduces the overhead produced by the collaborative spectrum sensing.