Outlier-aware cooperative 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 is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art PCA-based approach, and is flexible enough to defeat a variety of attacks encountered in SU networks. An online algorithm, that can handle incorporate multiple SU readings sequentially and adapt to time-varying channels, primary user, and malicious user activity, is also proposed and shown to be consistent. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithms.