Spectrum sensing is the main function of cognitive radio (CR), which enables the CR users to detect
the spectrum holes. Inherent characteristics of CR have imposed some serious threats to the
networks. One of the common threats in CR network is primary user emulation attack (PUEA). In this
particular type of attack, some malicious users try to imitate primary signal characteristics and
defraud CR users to prevent them from accessing the spectrum holes. Therefore, an effective
defense strategy is extremely important for robust collaborative spectrum sensing (CSS). The
current study introduces a new CSS scheme in the presence of an intelligent PUEA, called attackaware CSS (ACSS), which is aware of spectrum holes and actually co-located with the licensed
primary user (PU) and transmits with the same power level in a way that CR users are not easily able
to differentiate between received signal from PU and PUEA. The idea is based on attack strength
estimation, where the attack strength is defined as the channel occupancy rate of malicious PUEA
which equals to the probability that the malicious emulator occupies a specific spectrum hole. The
proposed approach estimates the attack strength and innovatively applies in NeymanPearson or
likelihood ratio test to improve collaborative sensing performance. Simulation results are provided
to indicate the superiority of the proposed ACSS method against PUEA compared with the
conventional method.