Opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) is at the core of the cognitive radio technologies with the focus on improving spectrum utilization efficiency and reliability. Despite the benefits, existing OSA protocols suffer from their deterministic nature and cannot prevent an ill-intended jammer from disrupting legitimate communications. A cognitive jammer can always effectively jam the idle channels by exploiting public-available channel statistics and causes serious spectrum underutilization. This project addresses the challenge of establishing robust anti-jamming communication in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) through a multiple-line of defense approach. The research considers a variety of network environments and integrates defense technologies from different dimensions, including adaptive uncoordinated frequency hopping (AUFH), power control, and signal processing. The defense approach enables both reactive and proactive protections, from evading jammers to competing against jammers, and to expelling jamming signals, and thus ensures robust user communications in CRNs.
The research in this project has a potential to significantly advance the state-of-the-art and develop innovative and sophisticated defense strategies using the proposed multiple lines of defense approach. The proposed solutions will contribute towards eventually building robust and dependable CRNs that are critical to the future communication systems. The project will also contribute directly to the curriculum development, teaching, student supervising and future security engineer training. Major results of this project will be disseminated through presentations, publications, as well as online materials in the forms of tutorials and software packages.
