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1. Pri-Share: Enabling Inter-SAS Privacy Protection via Secure Multi-Party Spectrum Allocation

   Yu, H ; Shi, S ; Shi, Y ; Burger, E W ; Hou, Y T ; Lou, W ( May 2024 , IEEE)

   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, 

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2. TrustSAS: A Trustworthy Spectrum Access System for the 3.5 GHz CBRS Band

   https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM.2019.8737533  

   Grissa, Mohamed ; Yavuz, Attila A. ; Hamdaoui, Bechir ( June 2019 , IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications)

   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. 

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

   Hu, Yidan ; Zhang, Rui ( April 2019 , IEEE International 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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5. FaIR: Federated Incumbent Detection in CBRS Band

   Troglia, M ( November 2019 , : 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Dy- namic Spectrum Access Networks (DySPAN) - Workshop on Data-Driven Dynamic Spectrum Sharing)

   The next-generation spectrum access system (SAS) for the Citizens Broadband Radio Service band is equipped with environmental sensors (ESCs) to detect the presence of noninformed incumbent users, which allows the SAS to dynamically reassign spectrum resource for low privilege users to avoid interference. However, the performance of existing single-node detection model is limited by the sensor’s geo-locations; whereas a naive distributed sensing network with improved detection accuracy introduces a high bandwidth overhead due to the frequent communication of spectrum data. In addition, many existing coherent spectrum sensing methods are not feasible for CBRS band due to the unknown operational characteristics of incumbent military wireless applications. To address these issues, we propose a machine learning based non-coherent spectrum sensing system: (F)eder(a)ted (I)ncumbent Detection in CB(R)S (FaIR). FaIR leverages a communication-efficient distributed learning framework, federated learning, for ESCs to collaborate and train a data-driven machine learning model for incumbent detection under minimal communication bandwidth. Our preliminary results show that the federated learning method can exploit the spatial diversity of ESCs and obtain an improved detection model comparing to a naive distributed sensing and centralized model framework. We evaluate the FaIR model with a variety of spectrum waveforms at varying SNRs. Our experiments showed that FaIR improves the average detection accuracy compared to the single-node method, using a fraction of the bandwidth compared to the naive multinode method. 

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