Enhanced sensing performance through the integration of denoising autoencoder and ensembling techniques

In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), collaborative spectrum sensing has emerged as a promising technique for detecting primary user activity. However, the effectiveness of user cooperation is compromised by the presence of malicious users, specifically False Sensing Users (FSUs). FSUs undermine the effectiveness of collaborative sensing by providing misleading information to the fusion center (FC) in an attempt to selfishly access spectrum resources. Therefore, this study focuses on three types of FSUs that exhibit distinct attack patterns: No False Sensing (NFS, i.e., Always-No), Yes False Sensing (YFS), and Yes/No false sensing (YNFS) users. The FC collects reports from both FSUs and legitimate sensing users at varying time intervals. This study employs a denoising autoencoder (DAE) to enhance sensing reliability by mitigating the effects of abnormal sensing reports and noise disturbances at the FC. While current validation employs synthetic data that closely approximates theoretical CRN conditions, real-world RF validation represents an important direction for future work. The autoencoder produces cleaned soft energy data, which is fed into a machine learning (ML) classifier to estimate channel availability and accumulate global decisions. The present study assesses the effectiveness of various classification techniques, including decision trees (DT), k nearest neighbor (KNN), neural networks (NN), ensemble classification (EC), Gaussian naive Bayes (GNB), and random forest classifier (RFC), to classify channel states. Additionally, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive evaluation of these methods. The integration of DAE and EC yields high accuracy, F1 score, and Matthew's Correlation Coefficient (MCC), leading to a reliable global decision at the FC with minimal sensing error.