  Intrusion detection has become one of the most critical tasks in a wireless
network to prevent service outages that can take long to fix. The sheer variety
of anomalous events necessitates adopting cognitive anomaly detection methods
instead of the traditional signature-based detection techniques. This paper
proposes an anomaly detection methodology for wireless systems that is based on
monitoring and analyzing radio frequency (RF) spectrum activities. Our
detection technique leverages an existing solution for the video prediction
problem, and uses it on image sequences generated from monitoring the wireless
spectrum. The deep predictive coding network is trained with images
corresponding to the normal behavior of the system, and whenever there is an
anomaly, its detection is triggered by the deviation between the actual and
predicted behavior. For our analysis, we use the images generated from the
time-frequency spectrograms and spectral correlation functions of the received
RF signal. We test our technique on a dataset which contains anomalies such as
jamming, chirping of transmitters, spectrum hijacking, and node failure, and
evaluate its performance using standard classifier metrics: detection ratio,
and false alarm rate. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed
methodology effectively detects many unforeseen anomalous events in real time.
We discuss the applications, which encompass industrial IoT, autonomous vehicle
control and mission-critical communications services.
