CRII: NeTS: Embracing Dynamic Spectrum Sharing without Privacy Concerns

University Of Texas At San Antonio, San Antonio TX

Investigators

Abstract

The proliferation of wireless devices and bandwidth-hungry applications has led to unprecedented demands for pervasive wireless services and made wireless spectrum a scarce resource. Dynamic spectrum sharing has been proposed to address the worldwide spectrum shortage and improve spectrum utilization. It allows secondary users to access the underutilized licensed spectrum when the incumbent users are absent. However, in such a system, abundant information needs to be collected, analyzed, and shared, which leads to serious privacy issues for the involved parties, especially for crowdsourced spectrum sensing agents and the incumbent users. This project addresses such privacy problems, relieves concerns from the involved parties, and facilitates dynamic spectrum sharing. The researcher will actively channel the research results into the development of undergraduate and graduate curricula, engage undergraduate and under-represented students into research, including outreach activities to elementary students, and improve the presence of underrepresented minorities. The goal of this project is to limit unintended exposure of private information and design privacy-preserving mechanisms in centralized dynamic spectrum sharing systems while enabling efficient spectrum sharing. The project consists of two research thrusts. The first thrust assesses the impacts of location privacy countermeasures to radio environment map construction and investigates how to mitigate the dilemma between accuracy and location privacy through a novel quality-assured radio environment map construction method. The second thrust aims to design obfuscation mechanisms to protect the operational time privacy of the incumbent users while ensuring the spectrum efficiency in spectrum allocation. The project will improve the current understanding of privacy implications in the spectrum sharing paradigm with spatial and temporal dynamism and provide insights to other wireless communication systems with similar dynamism. 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.