Batch-based security-aware spectrum sharing with simultaneous assignment decisions in time-critical IoT networks with cognitive radio capabilities

Cognitive radio (CR) is considered as a key enabling communication technology that offers efficient wireless connectivity to Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Its integration with the future 5G architecture is expected to advance the IoT paradigm. Security attacks can severely degrade the performance of such CR-based IoT (CRIoT) networks. The effect of security attacks can be reduced by implementing defensive approaches. However, such solutions come at the expense of degrading spectrum efficiency and consuming more network resources. In this paper, we investigate the spectrum sharing and access problem in a multidevice single-transceiver CRIoT network with time-critical applications under jamming attacks. Our main goal is to maximize the number of simultaneously served IoT devices over all available idle channels while ensuring delay requirement, hardware, link quality, security attacks, and spectrum utilization constraints. This problem is formulated as a total unimodular binary linear programming, which is shown to be solvable in polynomial time. Unlike most of previous security-aware channel assignment solutions that conduct the channel assignment sequentially, our solution simultaneously provides secured distributed channel-assignment decisions for multiple CRIoT links (batching method). Batching can be realized through an admission control stage for CR IoT devices to announce their control packets. Simulation results reveal that our solution significantly improves network performance compared to previous security-aware schemes.