Location Robustness in 3.5 GHz Cognitive Radio Networks

The recent FCC ruling has proposed 3.5 GHz database-driven cognitive radio networks (CRNs) in which the database relies on a base station to determine his location to query the database for available spectrum. However, this creates a critical loophole for mounting GPS-spoofing attack, which can potentially result in interference with critical incumbent users. The adversary attacks base stations’ GPS which results in base stations querying the database with false location and obtaining incorrect available spectrum information. In this paper, we describe the impact of a GPS-spoofing attack on 3.5 GHz database-driven CRNs and propose multi-radio localization method to detect such attack. We also implement and evaluate the performance of our detection mechanism. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to examine the impact of a GPS spoofing attack on 3.5 GHz database-driven CRNs and present a detection mechanism for the same.