STBC: A Novel Blockchain-Based Spectrum Trading Solution

Abstract

The ever-developing 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) technology has recently drawn increased attention to the use and management of underutilized spectrum. Blockchain is a good potential solution, however, the Nakamoto consensus-based scheme has a low spectrum utilization rate, high transaction delay, and a huge waste of energy. In this paper, we present a novel decentralized distributed spectrum trading protocol STBC (Spectrum Trading Blockchain) base on blockchain, which explicitly aims for efficiency, simplicity, safety, and energy-saving. STBC uses a new consensus mechanism to quickly confirm transactions while tolerating up to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> /3 malicious nodes ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the total number of nodes), and its implementation code is very concise. We adopt the similar idea of sharding to improve the efficiency and scalability of the system. Due to the specificality of spectrum trading, it is necessary to protect the privacy of trading nodes. Therefore we propose a temporarily anonymous transaction that can effectively prevent DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. Moreover, theoretical analysis shows that STBC is also secure against mainstream attacks such as double-spending attacks and the power consumption of STBC is significantly less than the Nakamoto consensus-based scheme. The prototype evaluation of our protocol demonstrates that it improves the spectrum utilization by about 30% compared with the state-of-the-art blockchain spectrum trading schemes, and meanwhile reducing the transaction confirmation delay by about 12.5x.