Trust-based spectrum sharing for cognitive radio networks

Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) is a promising technology which deals with shared spectrum access and usage in order to improve the utilization of limited radio spectrum resources for future wireless communications and mobile computing. Security becomes a very challenging issue in CRNs as different types of attacks are very common to cognitive radio technology compared to general wireless networks. The proper working of cognitive radio and the functionality of CRNs relies on the compliant behaviour of the secondary user. In order to address this issue, we propose two approaches in this paper. Firstly, we propose a trust aware model to authenticate the secondary users of CRNs which offers a reliable technique to provide a security-conscious decision by using trust evaluation for CRNs. Secondly, we propose an analytical model for analyzing the availability of spectrum in CRNs using a stochastic approach. We have modeled and analyzed the availability of free spectrum for the usage of secondary users by adopting different activities in a spectrum management scheme to improve the spectrum availability in CRNs. © 2011 World Scientific Publishing Company