EARS: Collaborative Research: Crowdsourcing-Based Spectrum Etiquette Enforcement in Dynamic Spectrum Access

如今，无线电频谱正成为一种日益宝贵的自然资源，而事实表明，在现有的许可频段中，许多频谱未得到充分利用。为了提高频谱利用率，动态频谱接入（DSA）已被设想为一套有前景的新频谱管理范例，例如频谱交易/拍卖和机会性频谱接入。虽然DSA和可编程认知无线电使频谱接入具有更高的灵活性，但由于无线介质的开放性，它也容易受到各种形式的误用或滥用的影响。例如，没有有效许可证的未经授权的传输，或故意违反主用户（无线电）设置的干扰约束的二次传输。误用者不仅会为自己获得更高的吞吐量，而且会损害正常用户（无线电）频谱接入业务的效率。因此，执行频谱访问规则或礼仪对于确保DSA范例的最终成功至关重要。该项目开发了一个在动态频谱共享环境中执行礼仪和规则的框架。拟议研究的主要思想是让社区用户（无线电）检测滥用，并识别和惩罚不守规矩的设备。通过将监测邻里无线电接入行为的任务众包给许多认知无线电设备，可以获得多种好处：1)潜在的大量参与设备可以带来更大的检测覆盖率和准确性；2)不需要普及的专用可信基础设施或硬件；3)每个设备都可能是监控设备，这一事实会对不当行为产生更强的威慑作用。该跨学科研究计划包括四个主要部分：1)优化众包无源无线电流量监测框架，以检测大量DSA频谱中的接入不当行为；2)使用物理层识别识别行为不端的认知无线电设备的技术，即使信号波形可以自适应修改；3)利用多功能可重构天线的自适应友好干扰对频谱误用进行即时惩罚的技术；4)通过拍卖的方式设计激励机制，确保用户参与众包礼仪执行的每一项任务。该项目的成功将使部署DSA的多个当前和未来应用领域受益，特别是那些需要关键信息保护的领域，如医疗保健、交通、能源、公共服务、应急和军事服务。

The radio spectrum is becoming an increasingly valuable natural resource nowadays, while it has been shown that much of the spectrum is underutilized in existing licensed bands. To enhance spectrum utilization, dynamic spectrum access (DSA) has been envisioned as a set of promising new spectrum management paradigms, such as spectrum trading/auction and opportunistic spectrum access. While DSA and programmable cognitive radios enable a much higher flexibility of spectrum access, due to the openness of wireless medium, it is also susceptible to various forms of misuse or abuse. For example, unauthorized transmissions without a valid license, or secondary transmissions that intentionally disobey the interference constraints set by the primary users (radios). The misusers will not only gain higher throughput for themselves, but also harm the efficiency of spectrum access operations of normal users (radios). Therefore, enforcing spectrum access rules or etiquettes is crucial to ensuring the ultimate success of the DSA paradigm. This project develops a framework for etiquette and rule enforcing in dynamic spectrum sharing environments. The main idea of the proposed research is to engage community users (radios) to detect misuse, and identify and punish unruly devices. By crowdsourcing the tasks of monitoring neighborhood radio access behaviors to many cognitive radio devices, multiple benefits can be gained: 1) the potentially large number of participating devices can result in much larger detection coverage and accuracy; 2) no pervasive dedicated trusted infrastructure or hardware is needed; and 3) the fact that every device could possibly be a monitoring device leads to a much stronger deterrence to misbehaviors. The interdisciplinary research plan consists of four major components: 1) an optimized crowdsourced passive radio traffic monitoring framework to detect access misbehavior in the vast DSA spectrum; 2) techniques to identify misbehaving cognitive radio devices using physical layer identification, even when the signal waveform can be adaptively modified; 3) techniques for immediate punishment of spectrum misuse through adaptive friendly jamming which exploits multi-functional re-configurable antennas; and 4) incentive mechanism design via auctions to ensure user participation in each task of crowdsourced etiquette enforcement. The success of this project will benefit multiple current and future application domains deploying DSA, especially those that require critical information protection, such as healthcare, transportation, energy, public services, emergency, and military services.