Exploiting Context-Awareness for Secure Spectrum Trading in Multi-hop Cognitive Cellular Networks

Abstract: In this paper, we consider context-awareness to enhance route reliability and robustness in multi-hop cognitive networks. A novel context-aware route discovery protocol is presented to enable secondary users to select the route according to their QoS requirements. The protocol facilitates adjacent relay selection under different criteria, such as shortest available path, route reliability and relay reputation. New routing and security-based metrics are defined to measure route robustness in spatial, frequency and temporal domains. Secure throughput, defined as the percentage of traffic not being intercepted in the network, is provided. The resources needed for trading are then obtained by jointly optimizing secure throughput and trading price. Simulation results show that when there is a traffic imbalance of factor 4 between the primary and secondary networks, 4 channels are needed to achieve 90% link reliability and 99% secure throughput in the secondary network. Besides, when relay reputation varies from 0.5 to 0.9, a 20% variation in the required resources is observed.