We expect future dynamic spectrum sharing regimes to be implemented in a distributed manner, to support efficient coordination among relevant entities sharing spectrum slices. However, distributed coordination of spectrum allocation is challenging, particularly in an environment where nodes may be deployed by different (potentially competing) entities, may have differing observations of physical properties such as interference levels, and may experience failures (including node crashes, measurement errors, message loss, or even security breaches leading to node compromises). The Byzantine fault model provides a promising approach to reason about such challenges: in this model, a fraction of nodes may behave in arbitrary or even malicious ways. Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols enable correct nodes to make consistent decisions despite arbitrary behavior from a subset of nodes.
In this seed project, we map spectrum sharing strategies to BFT models that can make spectrum sharing trustworthy for incumbents and secondary users.