SpecEES: Cooperative Green RF Sensing over Shared Spectrum

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Radar occupies a significant fraction of the spectrum below 6 GHz. This is a highly congested frequency band also heavily used by wireless communications. In recent years, there has been a growing demand from the wireless sector to free up more of the government-held spectrum, including those allocated to radar, in order to expand mobile broadband capabilities, promote wireless innovation, and boost the economy. Nonetheless, radar stakeholders are often unwilling to share their spectrum due to lack of incentives, as well as concerns over interference from the wireless communication devices that can disrupt the radar operation. This project considers such a spectrum-sharing scenario between radar and wireless communications and proposes a set of research efforts that are aimed to motivate radar stakeholders to open their spectrum for sharing. Specifically, it will develop new spectrum sharing protocols and cooperative radio frequency (RF) sensing techniques that protect, secure, and incentivize the radar users with reward of energy efficiency and enhanced sensing capabilities bestowed by sharing. The proposed research is expected to provide win-win solutions that will not only enable the radar to better detect, image, identify, and track targets with higher energy efficiency, but also allow wireless devices to enjoy significantly improved spectrum access opportunities. On the educational front, this project will offer opportunities for curricula development, training of undergraduate and graduate students, summer research programs targeting local high school students, and recruitment of students from underrepresented groups to this project.This project targets a spectrum sharing scenario, where radar owns and is willing to share its spectrum with wireless communication users under the condition that the radar operation is not to be compromised. The proposed efforts are integrated through the following four research thrusts: (1) a radar-centric cooperative design framework for spectrum sharing that protects the radar while improving the wireless communications; (2) a cooperative illumination approach that allows the radar to exploit wireless communication sources as passive illuminators; (3) a cooperative RF sensing paradigm whereby the radar and multiple spectrum-sharing communication devices cooperatively perform a distributed RF sensing task; and (4) security and privacy with radar and communication cross design that capitalizes on a new hybrid authentication scheme using integrated cryptographic credentials and non-cryptographic device fingerprints. The proposed RF sensing framework allows the radar to constructively employ co-channel communication sources as passive illuminators, which provide free illumination power and, more importantly, additional multi-static sensing geometries that enable the radar to achieve enhanced sensing capability and energy efficiency, i.e., the green RF sensing. To address the security and privacy issues inherent in the proposed framework, this project will develop a new hybrid authentication scheme that leverages unique device fingerprints and data analytics tools including deep learning to secure the proposed spectrum sharing and cooperative sensing solutions.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.