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（DSA）是一种频谱共享方法，其允许次要用户（SU）机会性地接入被授权给现任用户（IU）的未充分利用的频谱带。它有可能极大地提高频谱利用效率，并显着提高无线通信的容量。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向不可信的第三方提供敏感的操作数据。例如，许多政府国际单位的业务数据是保密的。SU的操作数据也可能是其运营商的商业秘密。虽然一些现有的研究已经考虑了隐私保护，但这些工作没有考虑其方案对DSA系统的效率和容量的重大负面影响。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可以被联合解决之前采用DSA。该项目的目标是通过为一系列可能的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。该项目将提供解决DSA系统操作隐私问题的解决方案，而不会牺牲频谱分配效率和系统容量。该项目将极大地促进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被纳入这一项目努力。这个项目有两个重点。推力1研究集中式DSA设计中的高效和安全的频谱分配，而推力2研究分布式DSA的相同问题。 对于集中式DSA，中央实体和最终用户都被认为可能受到损害。 有了这些假设，每种类型的集中式设计中的隐私和安全威胁将分别进行深入研究。 新的方案将被设计为解决这些威胁的每一种类型的集中式DSA设计与频谱分配效率和系统容量的联合考虑。对于分布式DSA，在用户之间交换的信息可能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，或者使系统暴露于欺骗的威胁，其中一些用户可能在信息交换期间撒谎。该项目将探索解决这些问题的方法，并专注于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NSF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.