Secure routing in multi-hop iot-based cognitive radio networks under jamming attacks

Abstract

Integrating Cognitive Radio (CR) technology in Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices allows efficient large-scale deployment of IoT systems. Recently, research efforts are shifted toward adopting CR in IoT as a response for the spectrum scarcity problem. Unfortunately, CR Networks (CRNs) share the same security weaknesses with traditional wireless networks. CR communication is also vulnerable to jamming attacks which can significantly affect network performance, consume network resources and results in delays, that make it less suitable for IoT time-critical systems. Routing in CR-based IoT networks, in general, considered as a challenging issue. Under the jamming attack, routing becomes even more challenging. In this paper, we introduce a new jamming-aware routing and channel assignment protocol that deals with proactive jamming attacks in CR-based IoT networks without requiring extra resources. The proposed protocol attempts at improving the overall packet delivery ratio in the network while considering the primary user’s activities, multi-channel fading and jamming behavior. The proposed protocol consists of three phases: route discovery, channel assignment, and path selection. The channel assignment problem along each path is formulated as an optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the end-to-end probability of success. This problem is shown to be an uni-modular problem, which can be solved in polynomial-time using linear programming techniques. Compared to reference protocols, simulation results reveal that the proposed protocol significantly improves network performance in terms of packet delivery ratio.