NeTS: Small: Social Tie Aware Spectrum Sharing: Physical-Social Game and Cloud-based Cooperative Sensing

NeTS: Small: Social Tie Aware Spectrum Sharing: Physical-Social Game and Cloud-based Cooperative Sensing NeTS: Small: Social Tie Aware Spectrum Sharing: Physical-Social Game and Cloud-based Cooperative Sensing PROJECT SUMMARY Overview. Wireless traffic has been growing exponentially in the past several years, and the sharp increase in mobile traffic is projected to continue in the foreseeable future. Compounding the issue of congested wireless networks is the rapid growth in social networks, where many users view contents on their smartphones. To meet the rapidly growing demand of wireless applications, there is an urgent need to develop innovative spectrum access techniques that enable wireless devices to dynamically sense the communication environment and adapt their transmission schemes, in terms of spectrum access methods and/or networking protocols to meet the quality of service requirements therein. One key observation is that wireless devices are carried by human beings and people typically behave with (bounded) rationality and involve social interactions. Then, a natural question to ask is that Is it possible to leverage human social trust to enhance spectrum sharing?. Indeed, with the explosive growth of online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, more and more people are actively involved in online social interactions, and social ties among people are being extensively broadened [?]. We believe that this will definitively open up a new avenue for spectrum access system design by exploiting social interactions. Trustworthiness, which is mostly a social issue, by and large has been ignored in the design of wireless systems. With an innovative agenda, this focused effort will develop social trust based shared spectrum access mechanisms that achieve substantial gains in spectral efficiency. Intellectual merit. This project advocates a social aware approach to enable shared spectrum access and cooperative spectrum sensing by exploiting social trust. Shared spectrum access schemes will be devised while taking into account both physical coupling and social coupling among users. Specially, under the common theme of exploiting social trust for enhancing shared spectrum access, the proposed research is organized into two well-coordinated thrusts: 1) Thrust I focuses on database assisted spectrum access where distributed channel allocation with social trust is cast as a physical-social game, in which each secondary user carries out channel selection to maximize its social group utility, defined as the weighted sum of its own utility and the utilities of other users having social trust towards it. 2) The focus of Thrust II is to investigate new mechanisms for incentivizing users to participate in cooperative spectrum sensing by exploiting social trust among users. Broader impacts. This project serves as an excellent example for exploring innovative research on the interplay among engineering, social sciences, and economics for improving spectrum efficiency. The findings on exploiting social trust for shared spectrum access will advance the state-of-the-art of cognitive radio network design, and have great potential to benefit the society at large. The proposed research will also establish a general social group utility maximization framework that bridges non-cooperative game theory and social welfare maximization - two traditionally disjoint paradigms for network optimization and design. Graduate students participating in this project will get trained on a variety of subjects, ranging from wireless networks to social networks, from network optimization to protocol design, and from game theory to behavior economics. The PI is strongly committed to promoting diversity by providing research opportunities to woman and under-represented students. Key Words: Shared spectrum access, social trust, physical-social game, channel recommendation, cooperative spectrum sensing