Secure and privacy-preserving database-driven dynamic spectrum sharing
Date
2021
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Database-driven Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) is the de facto technical paradigm adopted by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for meeting the ever-growing spectrum demand by allowing secondary users (SUs) to opportunistically access licensed spectrum bands without causing interference to primary users transmissions.
In a database-driven DSS system, a geo-location database administrator (DBA) maintains the spectrum availability in its service region in the form of a radio environment map (REM). Maintaining accurate spectrum availability information requires the DBA to periodically collect a large number of spectrum measurements, for which a promising approach is to rely on mobile crowdsourcing by outsourcing spectrum sensing tasks to distributed mobile users. Database-driven DSS armed with crowdsourcing-based spectrum sensing, unfortunately, faces many security and privacy challenges. ☐ This dissertation tackles three key security and privacy challenges in database-driven DSS to pave the way for its wide development and deployment. First, the DBA relies on spectrum measurements submitted by mobile users to construct and maintain the REM, but some mobile users may be malicious or compromised to submit false spectrum measurements. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel mechanism for secure REM construction in the presence of false measurements. Second, crowdsourcing-based spectrum sensing relies on mobile users' participation, who not only require strong incentive, but also demand privacy protection. To tackle this challenge, we design an incentive mechanism that simultaneously achieves differential bid privacy, truthfulness, and high REM accuracy. Third, an effective approach to process a large number of spectrum access requests with low latency is to adopt the edge computing paradigm by having the DBA continuously pushes the spectrum availability updates to distributed local edge servers, which in turn process spectrum access requests from nearby SUs on the DBA's behalf. However, edge servers owned by different entities cannot be fully trusted to process SU's spectrum request based on authentic and the most recent spectrum information, which may result in either loss of revenue or harmful interference to PUs' transmissions. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel freshness authentication mechanism to allow SUs to verify that their spectrum-access requests are decided based on authentic and up-to-date spectrum availability information.
Description
Keywords
Database-driven dynamic spectrum sharing, Privacy-preserving, Radio environment map