Boosting Secondary-User Performance

This chapter addresses a few challenges and issues in developing Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs), and provides unique solutions to enhance security at physical layer and to boost CRN computing power in a distributed manner. In this age of vast connectivity, network security becomes more and more prominent. In addition to the security means added at the upper layers, security can be further enhanced at physical layer. In particular, location based wideband channel characteristic as a unique signature can be utilized for security enhancement. Such a scheme is proposed and examined in different configurations. Lack of computing power is another critical issue, as CRN is expected to have more and more features. Instead of increasing onboard computing power, off-board computing resources can be connected to boost overall computing power. With increased computing power, the CRNs would be able to undertake computationally heavy tasks such as executing machine-learning algorithms and performing radio intrusion detection.