SpecEES: Collaborative Research: Study of the Tradeoff between Spectrum Allocation Efficiency and Operation Privacy in Dynamic Spectrum Access Systems

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Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is a spectrum sharing method that allows secondary users (SUs) to opportunistically access under-utilized spectrum bands that were licensed to incumbent users (IUs). It has the potential to dramatically improve the spectrum utilization efficiency and significantly boost the capacity of wireless communications. However, DSA gives rise to many new operational privacy issues because the existing designs require IUs and SUs to provide sensitive operational data to untrusted third parties. As an example, the operational data for many government IUs is classified. The SUs' operational data may also be a commercial secret for their operators. While some existing research has considered privacy protections, these works fail to consider the significant negative impact of their schemes on the efficiency and capacity of DSA systems. Thus, regulators and potential SU/IU operators often are unwilling to adopt DSA before the spectrum efficiency, capacity and operation privacy issues can be jointly addressed. The goal of this project is to solve the above challenges by providing a joint study of efficiency, capacity and privacy for a comprehensive range of possible DSA system designs. This project will provide solutions for addressing operational privacy concerns of DSA systems without sacrificing spectrum allocation efficiency and system capacity. This project can greatly promote the adoption of DSA technologies and hence enhance the capacity of the entire nation's wireless broadband networks. Supporting of underrepresented groups is also integrated in this project effort. This project has two thrusts. Thrust 1 studies the efficient and secure spectrum allocation in centralized DSA designs, while thrust 2 studies the same issue for distributed DSA. For centralized DSA, both the central entity and end users are considered to be potentially compromised. With these assumptions, the privacy and security threats in each types of centralized designs will be thoroughly studied individually. New schemes will be designed to address these threats for each type of centralized DSA designs with joint considerations on both spectrum allocation efficiency and system capacity. For distributed DSA, the information exchanged among the users may inadvertently reveal sensitive information of these users to other (untrusted) users or expose the system to threats of cheating where some users may lie during information exchange. This project will explore approaches to solve these issues and focus on making sure that the proposed solutions do not reduce the efficiency of the distributed system design while protecting the privacy and trustworthiness of the information exchange.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.