Robust Consensus-Based Cooperative Spectrum Sensing under Insistent Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification Attacks

In this paper, we introduce Insistent Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification (ISSDF) as a new practical and destructive attack model aimed at distributed cooperative spectrum sensing schemes that are based on iterative average consensus. We compare various linear iteration-based and iterative gossip-based schemes in terms of primary user detection performance and convergence speed under this attack. Moreover, we devise a trust management scheme to mitigate the attack and we propose a practical trust-aware consensus-based scheme for distributed cooperative spectrum sensing which is resilient to ISSDF. Finally, we quantify the performance improvement due to trust management through extensive simulations.