Outlier-aware spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks

This paper considers the problem of cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks (CRN). Communication in CRNs may be disrupted due to the presence of malicious secondary users (SU) or channel impairments such as shadowing. This paper proposes a spatio-frequency framework that can detect and track malicious users and anomalous measurements in CRNs. The joint problem of spectrum sensing and malicious user identification is posed as an optimization problem that aims to exploit the sparsity inherent to both, spectrum occupancy and malicious user occurrence. Proposed scheme obtains improved performance by utilizing node location information, and can handle missing or inaccurate location information, and noisy SU reports. A distributed block-coordinate descent-based algorithm is proposed, that outperforms the state-of-the-art PCA-based approach, and is flexible enough to defeat a variety of attacks encountered in SU networks. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.