• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.8 no.11
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• pp.3711-3730
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• 2014

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) have emerged as a promising solution to enhance spectrum utilization by using unused or less used spectrum in radio environments. The basic idea of CRNs is to allow secondary users (SUs) access to licensed spectrum, under the condition that the interference perceived by the primary users (PUs) is minimal. In CRNs, the channel availability is uncertainty due to the existence of PUs, resulting in intermittent communication. Transmission control protocol (TCP) performance may significantly degrade in such conditions. To address the challenges, some transport protocols have been proposed for reliable transmission in CRNs. In this paper we survey the state-of-the-art transport protocols for CRNs. We firstly highlight the unique aspects of CRNs, and describe the challenges of transport protocols in terms of PU behavior, spectrum sensing, spectrum changing and TCP mechanism itself over CRNs. Then, we provide a summary and comparison of existing transport protocols for CRNs. Finally, we discuss several open issues and research challenges. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first survey on transport protocols for CRNs.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing Administration
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.348-359
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• 2010

Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate the performance of Clinical Research Nurses (CRNs) and the importance of their roles at the Regional Clinical Trial Centers (RCTCs). Method: A questionnaire focused on the role of CRNs was crafted by a researcher and the content validity was verified by a panel of experts on clinical research. The subjects of this study were 91 CRNs and Clinical Research Coordinators (CRCs), who were Korean registered nurses working at nine RCTCs. 77 subjects yielded valid data were analyzed using descriptive analysis, the Mann-Whitney U test, Spearman's rank order correlation coefficient, and Kruskal-Wallis test. Results: The performance of CRNs and the recognition in the importance of their roles were statistically significant different in age, education, CRN careers, positions, employment status and the phase of clinical trial. The role of direct caregiver was performed most often by CRNs. The role of coordinator of care and research (pre-study) was considered the most important role but performed the least frequent. Conclusions: The role of CRNs can easily be differentiated from CRCs who are not registered nurses. The domains of CRNs should be clearly identified and established. Moreover, research should be carried out on CRN training programs to cultivate competence in CRNs.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.8 no.11
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• pp.3860-3875
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• 2014

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) are composed of mobile users who can use multiple spectrum bands for communication. CRNs allow unlicensed users (called cognitive users) to efficiently utilize unused licensed spectrums without interfering with communications of licensed users (called primary users). The main goals of CRNs are to mitigate spectrum saturation and to improve spectrum utilization. This paper introduces state-of-the-art routing protocols for CRNs and addresses some limitations of these protocols. To resolve the limitations, we suggest a new research direction for routing protocols in CRNs. We implement our protocol to compare with the existing routing protocols for multi-hop CRNs. Our protocol shows good performance compared to the existing routing protocols in terms of network performance and PU protection.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.130-139
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• 2014

Due to the unpredictable nature of channel availability, carrying delay-sensitive traffic in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) is very challenging. Spectrum leasing of radio resources has been proposed in the so called coordinated CRNs to improve the quality of service (QoS) experienced by secondary users (SUs). In this paper, the performance of coordinated CRNs under fixed-rate with hard-delay-constraints traffic is analyzed. For the adequate and fair performance comparison, call admission control strategies with fractional channel reservation to prioritize ongoing secondary calls over new ones are considered. Maximum Erlang capacity is obtained by optimizing the number of reserved channels. Numerical results reveal that system performance strongly depends on the value of the mean secondary service time relative to the mean primary service time. Additionally, numerical results show that, in CRNs without spectrum leasing, there exists a critical utilization factor of the primary resources from which it is not longer possible to guarantee the required QoS of SUs and, therefore, services with hard delay constraints cannot be even supported in CRNs. Thus, spectrum leasing can be essential for CRN operators to provide the QoS demanded by fixed-rate applications with hard delay constraints. Finally, the cost per capacity Erlang as function of both the utilization factor of the primary resources and the maximum allowed number of simultaneously rented channels is evaluated.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.52 no.1
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• pp.79-86
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• 2015

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) offer the promise of intelligent radios that can learn from and adapt to their environment. CRN permits unlicensed users to utilize the idle spectrum as long as it does not introduce interference to the primary users due to the Federal Communications Commission's recent regulatory policies. Thereby, the security aspects in CRNs should be different with the other networks. The purpose of this paper is to devise a new delegation-based authentication protocol (NDAP) by extracting out the security aspects for unlicensed user authentication over CRNs from Tsai et al's delegation-based authentication protocol (TDAP). First of all, we will provide security analyses on the TDAP and set design goal for unlicensed user authentication. Then, we will propose a NDAP as a remedy mechanism for the TDAP and a new protocol for CRNs. The NDAP could be used as a security building block for the CRNs and various convergence applications.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.406-418
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• 2015

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) have emerged as a promising solution to the problem of spectrum under utilization and artificial radio spectrum scarcity. The paradigm of dynamic spectrum access allows a secondary network comprising of secondary users (SUs) to coexist with a primary network comprising of licensed primary users (PUs) subject to the condition that SUs do not cause any interference to the primary network. Since it is necessary for SUs to avoid any interference to the primary network, PU activity precludes attempts of SUs to access the licensed spectrum and forces frequent channel switching for SUs. This dynamic nature of CRNs, coupled with the possibility that an SU may not share a common channel with all its neighbors, makes the task of multicast routing especially challenging. In this work, we have proposed a novel multipath on-demand multicast routing protocol for CRNs. The approach of multipath routing, although commonly used in unicast routing, has not been explored for multicasting earlier. Motivated by the fact that CRNs have highly dynamic conditions, whose parameters are often unknown, the multicast routing problem is modeled in the reinforcement learning based framework of learning automata. Simulation results demonstrate that the approach of multipath multicasting is feasible, with our proposed protocol showing a superior performance to a baseline state-of-the-art CRN multicasting protocol.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.613-623
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• 2018

The instability of operational channels on cognitive radio networks (CRNs), which is due to the stochastic behavior of primary users (PUs), has increased the complexity of the design of the optimal routing criterion (ORC) in CRNs. The exploitation of available opportunities in CRNs, such as the channel diversity, as well as alternative routes provided by the intermediate nodes belonging to routes (internal backup routes) in the route-cost (or weight) determination, complicate the ORC design. In this paper, to cover the channel diversity, the CRN is modeled as a multigraph in which the weight of each edge is determined according to the behavior of PU senders and the protection of PU receivers. Then, an ORC for CRNs, which is referred to as the stability probability of communication between the source node and the destination node (SPC_SD), is proposed. SPC_SD, which is based on the obtained model, internal backup routes, and probability theory, calculates the precise probability of communication stability between the source and destination. The performance evaluation is conducted using simulations, and the results show that the end-to-end performance improved significantly.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.15-23
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• 2018

Spectrum allocation is a key operation in cognitive radio networks (CRNs), where secondary users (SUs) are usually selfish - to achieve itself utility maximization. In view of this context, much prior lit literature proposed spectrum allocation base on non-cooperative game models. However, the most of them proposed non-cooperative game models based on complete information of CRNs. In practical, primary users (PUs) in a dynamic wireless environment with noise uncertainty, shadowing, and fading is difficult to attain a complete information about them. In this paper, we propose a non-cooperative game joint hidden markov model scheme for spectrum allocation in CRNs. Firstly, we propose a new hidden markov model for SUs to predict the sensing results of competitors. Then, we introduce the proposed hidden markov model into the non-cooperative game. That is, it predicts the sensing results of competitors before the non-cooperative game. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the energy efficiency of networks and utilization of SUs.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.2 no.6
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• pp.357-366
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• 2013

Spectrum sensing, as a fundamental functionality of Cognitive Radio (CR), enables Secondary Users (SUs) to monitor the spectrum and detect spectrum holes that could be used. Recently, the security issues of Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) have attracted increasing research attention. As one of the attacks against CRNs, a Primary User Emulation (PUE) attack compromises the spectrum sensing of CR, where an attacker monopolizes the spectrum holes by impersonating the Primary User (PU) to prevent SUs from accessing the idle frequency bands. Energy detection is often used to sense the spectrum in CRNs, but the presence of PUE attack has not been considered. This study examined the effect of PUE attack on the performance of energy detection-based spectrum sensing technique. In the proposed protocol, the stationary helper nodes (HNs) are deployed in multiple stages and distributed over the coverage area of the PUs to deliver spectrum status information to the next stage of HNs and to SUs. On the other hand, the first stage of HNs is also responsible for inferring the existence of the PU based on the energy detection technique. In addition, this system provides the detection threshold under the constraints imposed on the probabilities of a miss detection and false alarm.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.7
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• pp.3414-3434
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• 2016

Classical key generation is complicated to update and key distribution generally requires fixed infrastructures. In order to eliminate these restrictions researchers have focused much attention on physical-layer (PHY-layer) based key generation methods. In this paper, we present a PHY-layer fingerprints based fuzzy key generation scheme, which works to prevent primary user emulation (PUE) attacks and spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attacks, with multi-node collaborative defense strategies. We also propose two algorithms, the EA algorithm and the TA algorithm, to defend against eavesdropping attacks and tampering attacks in mobile cognitive radio networks (CRNs). We give security analyses of these algorithms in both the spatial and temporal domains, and prove the upper bound of the entropy loss in theory. We present a simulation result based on a MIMO-OFDM communication system which shows that the channel response characteristics received by legitimates tend to be consistent and phase characteristics are much more robust for key generation in mobile CRNs. In addition, NIST statistical tests show that the generated key in our proposed approach is secure and reliable.