CS Forum: Suzan Bayhan, TU Berlin "Smart Contracts for Crowdsourced Spectrum Sensing"

Smart Contracts for Crowdsourced Spectrum Sensing

Suzan Bayhan
Senior Researcher, TU Berlin

Abstract:

To cope with the huge increase in cellular data traffic, mobile network operators (MNO) consider using also other spectrum bands which are under-utilized spatiotemporally. To discover such spectrum opportunities, several studies suggest exploiting the ubiquity of mobile devices to perform spectrum sensing. However, current solutions for crowdsourced spectrum sensing overlook the fact that mobile devices lack the incentives to sense without certain benefits as spectrum sensing results in energy and CPU overhead. To encourage participation, we explore the use of smart contracts running on a distributed ledger (e.g., Ethereum) for an MNO to announce its need for spectrum sensing, the interested sensors to register themselves as candidate sensors, and MNO to pay the selected sensors for their service. Despite the simplicity of the idea, the realization requires more thoughts as smart-contracts are limited in their storage and processing capacity, and incurs a high cost for the write operation. I will introduce our proposal Spass: spectrum sensing as a service via smart contracts and address the following questions: (i) what is the cost of running smart contract based spectrum discovery? and (ii) given that both the helpers and the miners have to be paid, under which conditions an MNO can sustain a profitable business via smart-contract based spectrum discovery? (iii) How can the smart-contract catch free-riders among the sensing participants?

Bio:

Suzan Bayhan is a senior researcher at TU Berlin and a docent in Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. She got her Ph.D. from Bogazici University in 2012 and worked as a post-doc at the University of Helsinki between 2012-2016. She was on N2Women board between 2017-2018. Her current research interests are resource allocation for wireless networks, spectrum sharing, and edge/fog/cloud computing. Suzan will join the University of Twente on September 2019 as an Assistant Professor.

CS forum is a seminar series arranged at the CS department. The talks are intended for presentations of postdoctoral level researchers and professors, both for visiting and CS-department-based researchers