Distributed Sensing for Spectrum Agility: Incentives and Security Considerations
Stamatios Arkoulis, Markus Fiedler, Pantelis A. Frangoudis, Ralph Herkenhöner, Giannis F. Marias, Hermann de Meer, George C. Polyzos · 2008
Abstract. In the last few years, we have witnessed a tremendous growth in the number of wireless devices operating in unlicensed spectrum. Wi-Fi equipment has become standard in laptops and handhelds, while Bluetooth prevails for short-range connectivity. The vision of the Internet of Things, where myriads of heterogeneous devices will interconnect over wireless sublayers, forming a huge network of networks is fast approaching its realization. In view of these advances, traditional Internet architectures at all layers will need to transform and adapt to accommodate for the increasing communication demands. Unlicensed wireless spectrum is scarce and we need agile sharing schemes to achieve its increased utilization. The cost for the lack of strict regulation is interference; for spectrum agility, thus, alternative interference mitigation strategies are necessary. A crucial step in this process is sensing the wireless environment to detect interference conditions. In this work, we focus on distributed unlicensed spectrum sensing, where information on spectrum usage conditions from multiple sources are fused to come to smart spectrum access decisions. In the heterogeneous open access environment that we envisage, multiple self-interested entities participate in the sensing and sharing processes. This poses security challenges, which we discuss in this paper. 1