NeTS: Small: Social Tie Aware Spectrum Sharing: Physical-Social Game and Cloud-Based Cooperative Sensing

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To meet the rapidly growing demand of wireless applications, there is an urgent need to develop innovative spectrum sharing techniques that enable cognitive radio devices to dynamically sense the communication environment and adapt their transmission schemes. One key observation is that wireless devices are carried by human beings and people typically behave with rationality in social interactions. Indeed, social trust is built upon human relationship, and altruistic behaviors are often observed in many human activities. With this insight, in this project a cognitive radio network is viewed as an overlay/underlay system where a "virtual social network" (i.e., the social tie structure among users) overlays the physical communication network. Then, the social tie structure is leveraged to facilitate cooperative sensing and spectrum sharing, and such cooperation has potential to achieve substantial gains in spectral efficiency. This project serves as an excellent example for exploring innovative research on the interplay among engineering, social sciences, and economics for improving spectrum efficiency. The findings on exploiting social tie structure for spectrum sharing contribute to advancing the state-of-the-art of cognitive radio network design, and have great potential to open a new avenue for enhancing spectrum sharing and hence benefit the society at large.With an innovative agenda, this project focuses on developing social tie aware spectrum sharing mechanisms, while taking into account both physical coupling and social coupling among cognitive radio users. Specially, under this common theme, this project is organized into two well coordinated thrusts: 1) Thrust I focuses on database assisted spectrum access when primary user activities change relatively slowly; and social-aware channel allocation among secondary users is cast in a manner in which each user carries out channel selection to maximize its social group utility, defined as the weighted sum of its own utility and the utilities of other users having social ties with it. Then, social group utility maximization (SGUM) for the physical-social game is investigated and distributed algorithms are devised to achieve social tie aware Nash equilibrium. 2) Thrust II is centered around devising a social-aware spectrum sensing framework when primary user activities change fast, in which a cloud-based platform is employed to incentivize secondary users to participate in sensing tasks by leveraging social trust among them. Intuitively, by leveraging the wisdom of crowds, cooperative sensing enables secondary users to overcome the challenges due to incomplete information and limited capability of individual users, leading to more accurate detection of spectrum opportunities. Besides extensive simulation studies, the devised techniques will be evaluated in a realistic wireless network testbed. Overall, this project aims to develop a social group utility maximization framework to capture complex social structure among mobile users, consisting of diverse positive social ties (e.g., between friends and allies) and negative social ties (due to malicious behavior).