On the application of blockchains to spectrum management

Spectrum sharing mechanisms have evolved to meet different needs related to increasing spectrum use efficiency. At first, decentralized and opportunistic cognitive radios (and cognitive radio networks) were the primary focus of research for these mechanisms. This gradually transitioned toward the development of cooperative sharing methods based on databases, typified by TV white spaces databases. Spectrum sharing is now the basis for the dynamic and fine-grained spectrum rights regime for the citizen's band radio service (CBRS) as well as for license shared access (LSA). The emergence of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin has stimulated interest in applying its underlying technology, blockchain, to other applications as well, such as securities trading and supply chain management. This paper explores the application of blockchain to radio spectrum management. While blockchains could underlie radio spectrum management more broadly, we will focus on dynamic spectrum sharing applications. Like the cooperative approaches currently in use, blockchain is a database technology. However, a blockchain is a decentralized database in which the owner of the data maintains control. We consider the benefits and limitations of blockchain solutions in general, and then examine their potential application to four major categories of spectrum sharing

Social Welfare Maximization Auction in Edge Computing Resource Allocation for Mobile Blockchain

Blockchain, an emerging decentralized security system, has been applied in many applications, such as bitcoin, smart grid, and Internet-of-Things. However, running the mining process may cost too much energy consumption and computing resource usage on handheld devices, which restricts the use of blockchain in mobile environments. In this paper, we consider deploying edge computing service to support the mobile blockchain. We propose an auction-based edge computing resource market of the edge computing service provider. Since there is competition among miners, the allocative externalities (positive and negative) are taken into account in the model. In our auction mechanism, we maximize the social welfare while guaranteeing the truthfulness, individual rationality and computational efficiency. Based on blockchain mining experiment results, we define a hash power function that characterizes the probability of successfully mining a block. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance of our auction mechanism which shows that our edge computing resources market model can efficiently solve the social welfare maximization problem for the edge computing service provider