skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Attention:

The NSF Public Access Repository (PAR) system and access will be unavailable from 10:00 PM to 12:00 PM ET on Tuesday, March 25 due to maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience.


Title: Demo: Spectrum Access System on Cognitive Radio Network Testbed
Radio frequency (RF) spectrum is transitioning from exclusive licensed to shared use in many bands. We demonstrate our design and implementation of a spectrum access system (SAS), which allows centrally coordinated access to shared spectrum. It shows how resources are requested by the radios and how the SAS tracks spectrum occupation and grants or denies access to requesting nodes. The open-source software framework is readily installed on Virginia Tech’s cognitive radio network (CORNET) testbed, a remotely-accessible wireless research platform of large scale.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1642873
PAR ID:
10042947
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ACM WiNTECH
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. The recent framework for tiered spectrum sharing in the 3.5 GHz band establishes rules in which multiple firms called Environment Sensing Capability operators (ESCs) may measure spectrum occupancy and sell these measurements to other firms to help facilitate spectrum access. Motived by this we consider a scenario in which two spectrum access firms (SAs) seeks to access a shared band of spectrum and must in turn purchase spectrum measurements from one of two ESCs. Given the measurements they purchase, the SA firms then compete on price to serve customers in a shared band of spectrum. We study how differences in the quality and price of the spectrum measurements impact the resulting market equilibrium between the SAs and find that having different qualities of measurements available to different SAs can lead to better economic welfare. 
    more » « less
  2. As part of its ongoing efforts to meet the increased spectrum demand, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has recently opened up 150 MHz in the 3.5 GHz band for shared wireless broadband use. Access and operations in this band, aka Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), will be managed by a dynamic spectrum access system (SAS) to enable seamless spectrum sharing between secondary users (SU s) and incumbent users. Despite its benefits, SAS’s design requirements, as set by FCC, present privacy risks to SU s, merely because SU s are required to share sensitive operational information (e.g., location, identity, spectrum usage) with SAS to be able to learn about spectrum availability in their vicinity. In this paper, we propose TrustSAS, a trustworthy framework for SAS that synergizes state-of-the-art cryptographic techniques with blockchain technology in an innovative way to address these privacy issues while complying with FCC’s regulatory design requirements. We analyze the security of our framework and evaluate its performance through analysis, simulation and experimentation. We show that TrustSAS can offer high security guarantees with reasonable overhead, making it an ideal solution for addressing SU s’ privacy issues in an operational SAS environment. 
    more » « less
  3. To enforce incumbent protection through a spectrum access system (SAS) or future centralized shared spectrum system, dynamic protection area (DPA) neighborhood distances are employed. These distances are distance radii, in which citizen broadband radio service devices (CBSDs) are considered as potential interferers for the incumbent spectrum users. The goal of this paper is to create an algorithm to define DPA neighborhood distances for radio astronomy (RA) facilities with the intent to incorporate those distances into existing SASs and to adopt for future frameworks to increase national spectrum sharing. This paper first describes an algorithm to calculate sufficient neighborhood distances. Verifying this algorithm by recalculating previously calculated and currently used neighborhood distances for existing DPAs then proves its viability for extension to radio astronomy facilities. Applying the algorithm to the Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO) with customized parameters results in distance recommendations, 112 kilometers for category A (devices with 30 dBm/10 MHz max EIRP) and 144 kilometers for category B (devices with 47 dBm/10MHz max EIRP), for HCRO’s inclusion into a SAS and shows that the algorithm can be applied to RA facilities in general. Calculating these distances identifies currently used but likely out-of-date metrics and assumptions that should be revisited for the benefit of spectrum sharing. 
    more » « less
  4. Dynamic spectrum sharing has emerged as a promising solution to address the spectrum scarcity challenge. Currently, the FCC has designated several Spectrum Access Systems (SAS) administrators to deploy their SAS that coordinates the usage of the certificated shared band(s) such as the 3.55-3.7 GHz CBRS band. The SAS ensures that the incumbent’s access to the shared band is guaranteed while also granting commercial users access rights when the incumbents are not present. However, explicitly sharing the spectrum band(s) information among participants raises privacy concerns. Certain participants, such as curious SAS administrators, have the ability to deduce the confidential operational patterns of the incumbents through the Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) or Incumbent Informing Capability (IIC) notifications. Additionally, a curious SAS administrator may obtain the client’s operational information of other SAS administrators throughout the process of inter-SAS coordination. We propose Pri-Share, a novel privacy-preserving spectrum sharing paradigm that tailors the threshold-based private set union (PSU) and homomorphic encryption (HE) techniques to address the aforementioned privacy problems. Specifically, it enables all parties to jointly compute a unified spectrum allocation plan to resolve the potential conflicts between different parties while safeguarding the confidentiality of each stakeholder’s spectrum requirements and usage. Pri-Share also ensures that while a curious participant might ascertain the usage of a particular spectrum band, they are unable to deduce the precise identity of the party utilizing it. Besides, Pri-Share adheres to the key spectrum allocation regulations outlined by FCC (part 96), such as assurance of access rights for various priority levels. Our implementation result shows that Pri-Share can be achieved with notable computational and communication efficiency, 
    more » « less
  5. To facilitate dynamic spectrum sharing, the FCC has designated certified SAS administrators to implement their own spectrum access systems (SASs) that manage the shared spectrum usage in the novel CBRS band. As a premise, different SAS servers must conduct periodic inter-SAS coordination to synchronize service states and avoid allocation conflicts. However, SAS servers may inevitably stop service for regular upgrades, crash down, or even perform maliciously that deviate from the normal routines, posing a fundamental operation security problem — the system shall be robust against these faults to guarantee secure and efficient spectrum sharing service. Unfortunately, the incumbent inter-SAS coordination mechanism, CPAS, is prone to SAS failures and does not support real-time allocation. Recent proposals that rely on blockchain smart contracts or state machine replication mechanisms to realize fault-tolerant inter-SAS coordination require all SASs to follow a unified allocation algorithm. They however face performance bottlenecks and cannot accommodate the current fact that different SASs hold their own proprietary allocation algorithms. In this work, we propose TriSAS—a novel inter-SAS coordination mechanism to facilitate secure, efficient, and dependable spectrum allocation that is fully compatible with the existing SAS infrastructure. TriSAS decomposes the coordination process into two phases including input synchronization and decision finalization. The firstphase ensures participants share a common input set while the second one fulfills a fair and verifiable spectrum allocation selec- tion, which is generated efficiently via SAS proposers’ proprietary allocation algorithms and evaluated by a customized designed allocation evaluation algorithm (AEA), in the face of no more than one-third of malicious participants. We implemented a prototype of TriSAS on the AWS cloud computing platform and evaluated its throughput and latency performance. The results show that TriSAS achieves high transaction throughput and low latency under various practical settings. 
    more » « less