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1. Differentially-Private Incentive Mechanism for Crowdsourced Radio Environment Map Construction

   https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM.2019.8737512  

   Hu, Yidan ; Zhang, Rui ( April 2019 , IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications)

   Database-driven Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) is a promising technical paradigm for enhancing spectrum efficiency by allowing secondary user to opportunistically access licenced spectrum channels without interfering with primary users' transmissions. In database-driven DSS, a geo-location database administrator (DBA) maintains the spectrum availability in its service region in the form of a radio environment map (REM) and grant or deny secondary users' spectrum access requests based on primary users' activities. Crowdsourcing-based spectrum sensing has great potential in improving the accuracy of the REM at the DBA but requires strong incentives and privacy protection to simulate mobile users' participation. To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces a novel differentially-private reverse auction mechanism for crowdsourcing-based spectrum sensing. The proposed mechanism allows the DBA to select spectrum sensing participants under a budget constraint while offering differential bid privacy, approximate truthfulness, and approximate accuracy maximization. Extensive simulation studies using a real spectrum measurement dataset confirm the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed mechanism. 

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2. A Spatiotemporal Approach for Secure Crowdsourced Radio Environment Map Construction

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2020.2992939  

   Hu, Yidan ; Zhang, Rui ( May 2020 , IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking)

   Database-driven Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) is the de-facto technical paradigm adopted by Federal Communications Commission for increasing spectrum efficiency, which allows licensed spectrum to be opportunistically used by secondary users. In database-driven DSS, a geo-location database administrator (DBA) maintains spectrum availability information over its service region in the form of a Radio Environment Map (REM), where the received signal strength from the primary user at every location is either directly measured via spectrum sensing or estimated via statistical spatial interpolation. Crowdsourcing-based spectrum sensing is a promising approach for periodically collecting spectrum measurements over a large geographic area but is unfortunately vulnerable to false spectrum measurements. Despite a large body of prior work on secure cooperative spectrum sensing, how to construct an accurate REM in the presence of false measurements remains an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce ST-REM, a novel spatiotemporal approach for securely constructing an REM in the presence of false spectrum measurements. Inspired by the self-label techniques developed for semi-supervised learning, ST-REM iteratively constructs an REM from a small number of spectrum measurements from trusted anchor sensors and many more measurements from mobile users. During each iteration, the DBA evaluates the trustworthiness of each measurement by jointly considering its spatial fitness with other trusted measurements and the mobile user's long-term behavior. By gradually incorporating the most trustworthy spectrum measurements, the DBA is able to construct a REM with high accuracy. Extensive simulation studies using a real spectrum measurement dataset confirm the efficacy and efficiency of ST-REM. 

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3. Secure crowdsourced radio environment map construction

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICNP.2017.8117556  

   Hu, Yidan ; Zhang, Rui ( October 2017 , Network Protocols (ICNP), 2017 IEEE 25th International Conference on)

   Database-driven Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) is the de-facto technical paradigm adopted by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for increasing spectrum efficiency. In such a system, a geo-location database administrator (DBA) maintains spectrum availability information over its service region whereby to determines whether a secondary user can access a licensed spectrum band at his desired location and time. To maintain spectrum availability in its service region, it is desirable for the DBA to periodically collect spectrum measurements whereby to construct and maintain a Radio Environment Map (REM), where the received signal strength at every location of interest is either directly measured or estimated via proper statistical spatial interpolation techniques. Crowdsourcing-based spectrum sensing is a promising approach for periodically collecting spectrum measurements over a large geographic area, which is, unfortunately, vulnerable to false spectrum measurements. How to construct an accurate REM in the presence of false measurements remains an open challenge. This paper introduces SecREM, a novel scheme for securely constructing a REM in the presence of false spectrum measurements. SecREM relies on a small number of trusted spectrum measurements whereby to evaluate the trustworthiness of the measurements from mobile users and gradually incorporate the most trustworthy ones to construct an accurate REM. Extensive simulation studies based on a real spectrum measurement dataset confirm the efficacy and efficiency of SecREM. 

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4. Comparison of Incumbent User Privacy Preserving Technologies in Database Driven Dynamic Spectrum Access Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05490-8_6  

   Li, He ; Yang, Yaling ; Dou, Yanzhi ; Lu, Chang ; Zabransky, Doug ; Park, Jung-Min ( June 2018 , CROWNCOM 2018: Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks)

   Database driven dynamic spectrum sharing is one of the most promising dynamic spectrum access (DSA) solution to address the spectrum scarcity issue. In such a database driven DSA system, the centralized spectrum management infrastructure, called spectrum access system (SAS), makes its spectrum allocation decisions to secondary users (SUs) according to sensitive operational data of incumbent users (IUs). Since both SAS and SUs are not necessarily fully trusted, privacy protection against untrusted SAS and SUs become critical for IUs that have high operational privacy requirements. To address this problem, many IU privacy preserving solutions emerge recently. However, there is a lack of understanding and comparison of capability in protecting IU operational privacy under these existing approaches. In this paper, thus, we fill in the void by providing a comparative study that investigates existing solutions and explores several existing metrics to evaluate the strength of privacy protection. Moreover, we propose two general metrics to evaluate privacy preserving level and evaluate existing works with them. 

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5. When the hammer meets the nail: Multi-server PIR for database-driven CRN with location privacy assurance

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CNS.2017.8228646  

   Grissa, Mohamed ; Yavuz, Attila A. ; Hamdaoui, Bechir ( October 2017 , IEEE)

   We show that it is possible to achieve information theoretic location privacy for secondary users (SUs) in database-driven cognitive radio networks (CRNs) with an end-to-end delay less than a second, which is significantly better than that of the existing alternatives offering only a computational privacy. This is achieved based on a keen observation that, by the requirement of Federal Communications Commission (FCC), all certified spectrum databases synchronize their records. Hence, the same copy of spectrum database is available through multiple (distinct) providers. We harness the synergy between multi-server private information retrieval (PIR) and database-driven CRN architecture to offer an optimal level of privacy with high efficiency by exploiting this observation. We demonstrated, analytically and experimentally with deployments on actual cloud systems that, our adaptations of multi-server PIR outperform that of the (currently) fastest single-server PIR by a magnitude of times with information-theoretic security, collusion resiliency, and fault-tolerance features. Our analysis indicates that multi-server PIR is an ideal cryptographic tool to provide location privacy in database-driven CRNs, in which the requirement of replicated databases is a natural part of the system architecture, and therefore SUs can enjoy all advantages of multi-server PIR without any additional architectural and deployment costs. 

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