A Multi-Blockchain Scheme for Distributed Spectrum Sharing in CBRS System

Abstract

To overcome the spectrum scarcity issues, the citizens broadband radio service (CBRS) presents a centralized spectrum management solution. The efficiency of spectrum utilization could be further improved by introducing spectrum trading. Blockchain-based spectrum trading has been considered as a decentralized, flexible, and secure approach. However, current studies rarely investigate the interference to incumbent users caused by spectrum trading between CBRS devices (CBSDs), and the scalability issues in blockchain-based spectrum trading are rarely discussed. To address the problems above, this paper develops the blockchain-based spectrum trading mechanisms for CBRS. Particularly, we propose a queuing mechanism for intra-coexistence group (CxG) trading, in which spectrum trading is leveraged to reduce the aggregated interference to incumbents. A new parameter termed “network feature” is proposed to prioritize spectrum transactions in different queues, which helps to achieve the trade-off between the interference to incumbents and resource requirements in spectrum transactions. Furthermore, we propose a multi-blockchain architecture and a corresponding cross-chain mechanism to improve the speed of inter-CxG spectrum trading. Simulation results show that the aggregated interference to incumbents can be reduced by adopting the proposed method. Meanwhile, when adopting the proposed cross-chain spectrum trading mechanism, the network throughput can be improved by up to 24% compared with the traditional CBRS spectrum management framework.