A privacy-preserving spectrum auction scheme using paillier cryptosystem with public verification

Cognitive radio technology uses the ability of dynamic spectrum access to solve the problem of spectrum efficiency, but considered the view of application, the designs depended cognitive radio technology face the hardware restriction, and the cost is too expensive. Therefore the spectrum auction mechanism referenced to economic theory has a high value of application; the theory is a hot issue. However, existing spectrum auction mechanisms have faced with the problem of NP complexity, and also can not meet the demand of real-time. Based on the wireless spectrum auction theory, we have proposed an improved scheme of pricing mechanism by reverse algorithm.

In cellular networks, a recent trend in research is to make spectrum access dynamic in the spatial and temporal dimensions for the sake of efficient utilization of spectrum. In one such model, the spectrum is divided into channels and periodically allocated to competing base stations using an auction-based market mechanism. An “efficient” auction mechanism is essential to the success of such a dynamic spectrum access model. A key objective in designing an auction mechanism is “truthfulness.” Combining this objective with an optimization of some social choice function (such as the social-welfare or the generated revenue) is highly desirable. In this paper, we design polynomial-time spectrum auction mechanisms that are truthful and yield an allocation with O(1)-approximate social-welfare or revenue. Our mechanisms generalize to general interference models. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work to design polynomial-time truthful spectrum auction mechanisms with a constant-factor approximation of either the expected revenue or the social-welfare. We demonstrate the performance of our designed mechanism through simulations.

Dynamic spectrum redistribution---under which spectrum owners lease out under-utilized spectrum to users for financial gain---is an effective way to improve spectrum utilization. Auction is a natural way to incentivize spectrum owners to share their idle resources. In recent years, a number of strategy-proof auction mechanisms have been proposed to stimulate bidders to truthfully reveal their valuations. However, it has been shown that truthfulness is not a necessary condition for revenue maximization. Furthermore, in most existing spectrum auction mechanisms, bidders may infer the valuations---which are private information---of the other bidders from the auction outcome. In this paper, we propose a Differentially privatE spectrum auction mechanism with Approximate Revenue maximization (DEAR). We theoretically prove that DEAR achieves approximate truthfulness, privacy preservation, and approximate revenue maximization. Our extensive evaluations show that DEAR achieves good performance in terms of both revenue and privacy preservation.

Many spectrum auction mechanisms have been proposed for spectrum allocation problem, and unfortunately, few of them protect the bid privacy of bidders and achieve good social efficiency. In this paper, we propose PPS, a Privacy Preserving Strategyproof spectrum auction framework. We design two schemes based on PPS separately for 1) the single-unit auction model (SUA), where only single channel will be sold in the spectrum market; and 2) the multi-unit auction model (MUA), where the primary user subleases multi-unit channels to the secondary users and each of the secondary users wants to access multi-unit channels either. Since the social efficiency maximization problem is NP-hard in both auction models, we present allocation mechanisms with approximation factors of (1 + ε) and 32 separately for SUA and MUA, and further judiciously design strategyproof auction mechanisms with privacy preserving based on them. Our extensive evaluations show that our mechanisms achieve good social efficiency and with low computation and communication overhead.

Auctions are believed to be effective methods to solve the problem of wireless spectrum allocation. Existing spectrum auction mechanisms are all centralized and suffer from several critical drawbacks of the centralized systems, which motivates the design of distributed spectrum auction mechanisms. However, extending a centralized spectrum auction to a distributed one broadens the strategy space of agents from one dimension (bid) to three dimensions (bid, communication, and computation), and thus cannot be solved by traditional approaches from mechanism design. In this paper, we propose two distributed spectrum auction mechanisms, namely distributed VCG and FAITH. Distributed VCG implements the celebrated Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism in a distributed fashion to achieve optimal social welfare, at the cost of exponential communication overhead. In contrast, FAITH achieves sub-optimal social welfare with tractable computation and communication overhead. We prove that both of the two proposed mechanisms achieve faithfulness, i.e., the agents' individual utilities are maximized, if they follow the intended strategies. Besides, we extend FAITH to adapt to dynamic scenarios where agents can arrive or depart at any time, without violating the property of faithfulness. We implement distributed VCG and FAITH, and evaluate their performance in various setups. Evaluation results show that distributed VCG results in optimal allocation, while FAITH is more efficient in computation and communication.

In this paper, we investigate the problem of recall mechanism in a dynamic spectrum auction system. The licensed spectrum holders (SHs) can auction their idle channels to the secondary wireless service providers (SWSPs) for economic incentive. However, the primary user (PU) of an SH has higher priority than the SWSPs for the spectrum access. To deal with a sudden increase in PUs' spectrum demands after auction and guarantee their quality of services (QoS), we propose a Local recall-based dYnamic double spectRum auctIon meChanism (LYRIC) for SHs' spectrum auction operation. Different from the most existing approaches about spectrum recall-based spectrum auction, the proposed spectrum auction method for heterogeneous spectrum transaction takes account of the joint effect of heterogeneous demand, spectrum spatial reusability, and the economic efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed LYRIC algorithm can improve the auction process of SHs, the channels utilization efficiency and the average buyers' satisfactory level with guarantees on the QoS of PUs.

Unlike traditional auction schemes that do not take security into account, a good secure auction scheme first has to satisfy the following two properties: 1) correctness: the auction result should be the same as the result using traditional correct schemes; 2) security: during the auction process, the final result is the only information revealed to the participants. Furthermore, the secure auction scheme should be efficient enough so that the final result can be determined within a reasonable time. Existing works mainly deal with single-sided spectrum auction, and are not totally secure though claimed to be secure. For example, in [2], the auctioneer can easily know the sums of bids for all the possible allocations, and in [3], the auctioneer can obtain the bids of all buyer groups and their ranking order in the auction. This kind of information is sensitive and should be kept secret. In a very timely recent study [4], the authors propose PS-TRUST, a solution for secure double spectrum auction based on TRUST [5]. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that achieves both correctness and security for secure spectrum auction. Unfortunately, the efficiency of this work is not satisfactory.

The demand for mobile services is growing aberrantly, which provides both challenges and opportunities for wireless networks. Wireless network virtualization is suggested as a key progression path for enhancing the capacity and resource utilization in the forthcoming fifth-generation mobile networks. In this paper, a software-defined network (SDN) enabled cloud radio access network (C-RAN) framework is proposed for enabling spectrum auction with a two-tier architecture support. In Tier-I, several remote radio heads (RRHs) are introduced to act as the secondary service providers to provide services to its small cell users (SUEs) by exploiting the purchased underutilized or idle resources from the primary service provider in Tier-II. Specifically, in order to maintain quality-of-service requirements of the SUEs, the revenue maximization problem for the RRHs is formulated by considering the user association, band assignment, interference management, and budget allowance. In Tier-II, an SDN-enabled spectrum auction mechanism is proposed for maximizing the social welfare based on the SUEs’ service requirements of all participating RRHs from Tier-I. In this auction mechanism, the bipartite graph is utilized to determine the socially optimal winners and the price charging scheme is proposed inspired by the well-known Vickrey–Clarke–Groves auction method. Simulation results reveal the performance and the benefits of the proposed SDN-enabled spectrum auction mechanism under different scenarios.

Auction is an effective mechanism to distribute spectrum resources. Although many privacy-preserving auction schemes for spectrum allocation have been proposed, none of them is able to perform practical spectrum auctions while ensuring enough security for bidders' private information, such as geo-locations, bid values, and data access patterns. To address this problem, we propose SLISA, a lightweight auction framework which enables an efficient spectrum allocation without revealing anything but the auction outcome, i.e., the winning bidders and their clearing prices. We present contributions on two fronts. First, as a foundation of our design, we adopt a Shuffle-then-Compute strategy to build a series of secure sub-protocols based on lightweight cryptographic primitives (e.g., additive secret sharing and basic garbled circuits). Second, we improve an advanced spectrum auction mechanism to make it data-oblivious, such that data access patterns can be hidden. Meanwhile, the modified protocols adapt to our elaborate building blocks without affecting its validity and security. We formally prove the security of all protocols under a semi-honest adversary model, and demonstrate performance improvements compared with state-of-the-art works through extensive experiments.

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA), enabled by cognitive radio technologies, has become a promising approach to improve efficiency in spectrum utilization, and the spectrum auction is one important DSA approach, in which secondary users lease some unused bands from primary users. However, spectrum auctions are different from existing auctions studied by economists, because spectrum resources are interference-limited rather than quantity-limited, and it is possible to award one band to multiple secondary users with negligible mutual interference. To accommodate this special feature in wireless communications, in this paper, we present a novel multi-winner spectrum auction game not existing in auction literature. As secondary users may be selfish in nature and tend to be dishonest in pursuit of higher profits, we develop effective mechanisms to suppress their dishonest/collusive behaviors when secondary users distort their valuations about spectrum resources and interference relationships. Moreover, in order to make the proposed game scalable when the size of problem grows, the semi-definite programming (SDP) relaxation is applied to reduce the complexity significantly. Finally, simulation results are presented to evaluate the proposed auction mechanisms, and demonstrate the complexity reduction as well.

Cognitive radio networks (CRN) is a promising technology for the efficient utilization of spectrum resource. However, how to dynamically allocate the spectrum combining with the characteristics of CRN is a crucial challenge for the mechanism design. In this paper, from the perspective of frequency-time characteristics of the spectrum opportunity in CRN and the secondary users' flexible requirements, we model the dynamic spectrum allocation problem as a knapsack problem and prove that maximizing the social welfare is NP-hard. Therefore, a spectrum auction mechanism is developed to approximate the optimal social welfare, and we prove its approximate ratio. Further, to guarantee the truthfulness, we devise a corresponding payment scheme. In simulation results, we show that no matter how many SUs are in the CRN, our scheme can approximate the maximal social welfare perfectly, and the spectrum utilization can be improved to over 96.5% or even larger.

In dynamic spectrum auction, if a buyer locates in a "critical" place, interfering with many other buyers, its occupancy of the spectrum may deprive many others the transmission opportunity. In this paper, we for the first time propose a location-aware online double auction mechanism, LOTUS. The biggest challenge is: the spectrum requests are sporadic, an interference-harmful buyer may request spectrum earlier than others, making it difficult to decide whether to grant its spectrum request instantly. To address the challenge, we considers the opportunity cost of the spectrum allocation regarding location-based interference conditions. We introduce the "interference discount" to characterize the interference harmfulness. The simulation results show that LOTUS can improve buyers' utility by more than 110% over the static auction, and 25% over the online auction without considering interference discount. The spectrum utilization is enhanced by 120% over static auction, and 65.3% over the online auction without considering interference discount.

Dynamic spectrum markets for future wireless network devices will involve complex spectrum transactions. The spatio-temporal spectrum availability and the existence in the market of many diverse players with different power limit and channel bandwidth requirements, calls for new ways of allocating the spectrum [1]. Due to its perceived fairness and allocation efficiency, an auction strategy has been advocated as the best strategy for dynamic spectrum markets. However, designing an auction mechanism for a dynamic spectrum market is challenging because of the nature of the spectrum involved and the diverse secondary users, i.e., network players, involved, resulting into an auction mechanism with many complementary requirements. Many attempts from researchers result into spectrum auctions that meet only a few of these requirements. In this paper, a three-stage spectrum auction that not only meet most of these requirements but also ensures optimal spectrum allocation, is proposed.

Bidder-anonymous English auction scheme with privacy and public verifiability

We introduce the notion of covert security with public verifiability, building on the covert security model introduced by Aumann and Lindell (TCC 2007). Protocols that satisfy covert security guarantee that the honest parties involved in the protocol will notice any cheating attempt with some constant probability e. The idea behind the model is that the fear of being caught cheating will be enough of a deterrent to prevent any cheating attempt. However, in the basic covert security model, the honest parties are not able to persuade any third party (say, a judge) that a cheating occurred. We propose (and formally define) an extension of the model where, when an honest party detects cheating, it also receives a certificate that can be published and used to persuade other parties, without revealing any information about the honest party's input. In addition, malicious parties cannot create fake certificates in the attempt of framing innocents. Finally, we construct a secure two-party computation protocol for any functionality f that satisfies our definition, and our protocol is almost as efficient as the one of Aumann and Lindell. We believe that the fear of a public humiliation or even legal consequences vastly exceeds the deterrent given by standard covert security. Therefore, even a small value of the deterrent factor e will suffice in discouraging any cheating attempt.