A Blockchain-Based Distributed Collaborative Sensing and Spectrum Access Approach for Consumer Electronics

Cognitive radio (CR) provides key technical support for the seamless communication of consumer electronic (CE) devices through distributed cooperative sensing and spectrum access. However, its openness and dynamic nature introduce potential security risks and challenges. Due to the openness of wireless communication, spectrum sensing and access are vulnerable to malicious attacks, and resource-constrained devices cannot effectively implement artificial intelligence (AI)-driven encryption and access control strategies. To address these limitations, this study proposes a blockchain-based distributed collaborative sensing method for CE devices. In the proposed method, after sensing, the smart contracts verify node legitimacy using the ring signature method. The malicious users are rejected by the outlier detection method, which improves the collaborative anti-interference ability. In addition, by using a centralized training and distributed execution architecture, a secure spectrum sensing strategy based on multi-agent reinforcement learning is designed. The proposed strategy ensures that each node makes independent decisions, which enhances the adaptability of the CE ecosystem. The proposed method is verified by extensive simulations, and the results show that it can maintain spectrum awareness of more than 95.72% and an access success rate of 91.19% under malicious attacks. Moreover, communication overhead is significantly reduced by approximately 93.53%.