Smart Communications in Heterogeneous Spacecraft Networks: A Blockchain Based Secure Auction Approach

In the forthcoming space communications, there would be a large number of spacecrafts that belong to different organizations or countries. How to efficiently allocate spectrum resources for such heterogeneous spacecraft networks becomes a very important and challenging issue. While spectrum auction provides a potential solution to spectrum allocation, how to preserve the privacy during the auction process in the spacecraft networks has not been well studied yet. In this paper, we propose a secure spectrum auction scheme by utilizing blockchain and cryptography technologies, which can preserve bidders' identity and bid privacy, and protect the auctions against collusion attacks. We evaluate our method with well-designed experiments and demonstrate its effectiveness and practicability.