Most active band (MAB) attack and countermeasures in a cognitive radio network

This paper investigates a type of attacks on a cognitive radio (CR) network, most active band (MAB) attack, where an attacker or a malicious CR node senses/determines the most active band within a multi-band CR network and targets this band through a denial of service (DoS) attack. We propose a countermeasure strategy, coordinated concealment strategy (CCS), to counter the MAB attack. Our results show that CCS significantly outperforms CR's inherent capability of signal/interference avoidance under a MAB attack. We also introduce power control in CCS to further improve the countermeasure performance in terms of the percentage of survival nodes.