Economic frameworks for spectrum coexistence in advanced wireless networks
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
Electromagnetic spectrum is a renewable shared resource featuring a diverse array of agents attempting to facilitate communications on varying frequency bands. The ever-increasingly interconnected world has resulted in demand for spectrum utilization ranging from Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) clusters supporting smart city applications, to expansions of commercial cellular telephony and broadband internet services in environments where fiber optic deployments are impractical or temporarily disrupted, to support of highly localized industrial automation networks. The advent of the Fifth Generation wireless networking standards has enabled such demands to be realized. However, pre-existing spectrum allocations, especially in the most desirable blocks of spectrum along the mid-band (for propagation balance) and Terahertz bands (for transmission bandwidth), complicate deployments of networks. While in many cases these existing allocations are protected for Public Interest reasons, including scientific, defense, or information dissemination purposes, incumbent frequency utilization is not continuous in nature. This characteristic raises questions regarding allocations of resources to agents within wireless networks. In particular, we propose the use of Open Access Spectrum allocations, whereby commercial entities pay-per-request for access to spectrum not being used by Public Interest incumbents. This leads to two immediate questions: is such a framework viable for its participants, and what is the impact of segmenting commercial users into multiple tiers? The latter question arises from the notion that offering a general authorized use provision may be necessary to incentivize commercial utilization. In addition however, we must consider what occurs with specific applications utilizing spectrum. In particular, MEC networks are dependent not just on spectrum access but on cloud computing access, and are thus vulnerable to Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) attacks generating large amounts of compute resources. This leads to a third question: how do cloud provider actions impact the MEC's susceptibility to EDoS? Utilizing game theory to formally define agents, preferences, and actions, we propose three thrusts of investigation to answer these questions. In Thrust (I) we analyze interactions between Earth Exploration Satellite Service-passive radiometers and commercial users under the Open Access framework and a join-or-balk scenario, and determine that equilibria are unique and socially optimal even under a revenue maximizing objective. In Thrust (II), we consider a scenario where customers have the option to join a paid primary or general authorized secondary tier. Here, maximum revenues will be guaranteed but corresponding equilibria are not necessarily unique nor is the revenue maximizing state necessarily socially optimal. In Thrust (III) we consider behavior in a scalable MEC cluster connected to a network of Internet of Things devices. We find that billing models that enforce minimum charges on clusters increases the incentive to launch EDoS attacks compared to models that do not enforce such minimums. Additionally, randomizing scaling is shown to have potential to disrupt EDoS attack effectiveness while minimizing impacts on legitimate traffic.
Description
2025
License
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International