SpectrumBC: A Blockchain-Aided Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Framework

A critical security issue in the blockchain-aided cooperative spectrum sensing (B-CSS) network is that, blockchain cannot guarantee the reliability of off-chain data sources, even though the data has been recorded on the chain. Furthermore, the performance optimization of the B-CSS networks is constrained by an underlying tradeoff between throughput and security. Driven by these issues, we first develop a novel B-CSS framework with a decentralized reputation management (DRM) mechanism (named SpectrumBC), wherein nodes not only collaborate to detect the availability of target spectrum off the chain, but also act as the blockchain nodes to maintain global decisions on the chain. In the off-chain phase, the DRM mechanism can evaluate the reputation of each node based on the correlation of perceived results between neighboring nodes, thereby preventing unreliable nodes’ results from being recorded on-chain. Furthermore, in light of the on-chain throughput and security tradeoff, a verifiable reputation can be utilized as the consensus stake to adjust the difficulty level of block generation. Then, given the on-chain reputation consensus, we maximize the average throughput of the proposed framework by jointly optimizing the block size, sensing time, and block generation time. Simulation results demonstrate the optimized performance of the proposed framework. Moreover, compared with the benchmark schemes, SpectrumBC reduces the global miss probability by 77% under the dummy data-tampering attack and by 25% under the smart data-tampering attack.