SpecEES: Collaborative Research: Study of the tradeoff between spectrum allocation efficiency and operation privacy in dynamic spectrum access system

动态频谱接入（Dynamic spectrum access， DSA）是一种频谱共享方式，允许从用户（secondary user）机会地访问授权给现有用户（IUs）的未充分利用的频谱。它具有显著提高频谱利用效率和显著提高无线通信容量的潜力。然而，DSA引起了许多新的操作隐私问题，因为现有的设计要求iu和su向不受信任的第三方提供敏感的操作数据。例如，许多政府单位的操作数据是保密的。SUs的操作数据对其运营商来说也可能是商业机密。虽然现有的一些研究已经考虑了隐私保护，但这些工作没有考虑到他们的方案对DSA系统的效率和容量的显著负面影响。因此，监管机构和潜在的SU/IU运营商通常不愿意在频谱效率、容量和操作隐私问题得到共同解决之前采用DSA。该项目的目标是通过为各种可能的DSA系统设计提供效率、容量和隐私的联合研究来解决上述挑战。该项目将在不牺牲频谱分配效率和系统容量的情况下，为解决DSA系统的操作隐私问题提供解决方案。该项目可以极大地促进DSA技术的采用，从而提高整个国家无线宽带网络的容量。支持代表性不足的群体也纳入了本项目工作。这个项目有两个重点。推力1研究了集中式DSA设计中的高效安全频谱分配问题，推力2研究了分布式DSA设计中的相同问题。对于集中式DSA，中心实体和最终用户都被认为是潜在的威胁。在这些假设下，我们将分别深入研究每种集中式设计中的隐私和安全威胁。针对每种集中式DSA设计，将设计新的方案来解决这些威胁，同时考虑频谱分配效率和系统容量。对于分布式DSA，用户之间交换的信息可能会无意中将这些用户的敏感信息泄露给其他（不受信任的）用户，或者使系统面临欺骗的威胁，因为某些用户可能在信息交换过程中撒谎。本项目将探索解决这些问题的方法，并重点确保所提出的解决方案不会降低分布式系统设计的效率，同时保护信息交换的隐私和可信度。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.