Protecting Operational Information of Incumbent and Secondary Users in FCC Spectrum Access System

Abstract

Both Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) support dynamic spectrum access (DSA) as an enabling technology for spectrum sharing. To effectively realize DSA in practice, users (from both defense and civil sectors) are required to share their (radio) operational information. That risks exposing their security, privacy, and business plan to unintended agents. In this paper, taking FCC's spectrum access system (SAS) as a study case, we propose a privacy-preserving scheme for DSA by leveraging encryption and obfuscation methods (PSEO). To implement PSEO, we propose an interference calculation scheme that allows users to calculate interference budget without revealing their operation information (e.g., antenna height, transmit power, location...), referred to as blind interference calculation method (BICM). BICM also reduces the computing overhead of PSEO, compared with FCC's SAS by moving interference budgeting tasks to local users and calculating it in an offline manner. Extensive detailed analysis and simulations show that our proposed PSEO is able to better protect all users' operational privacy, guaranteeing efficient spectrum utilization with less online overhead, compared with state of the art approaches.