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Date:  Thu, August 15, 2013
Time:  3:00p.m. – 4:00p.m.
Location:  Holmes Hall 389
Speaker:  Rui Zhang, Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Hawaii.

 The explosive growth of wireless traffic along with limited radio spectrum resources is making Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) a key enabler for implementing the FCC National Broadband Plan. By definition, DSA allows unlicensed wireless devices (secondary users) with cognitive radio capabilities to have more flexible and efficient access to the precious radio spectrum without causing interference to licensed wireless devices (primary users). As an essential DSA component, cooperative spectrum sensing enables the accurate identification of transmission opportunities for secondary users. How to effectively and efficiently perform cooperative spectrum sensing over a larger geographic region, however, remains an open challenge. In this talk, I will introduce a novel secure and privacy-preserving architecture for cooperative spectrum sensing through mobile crowdsourcing. In this architecture, a spectrum-sensing provider (SSP) outsources spectrum-sensing tasks to ubiquitous mobile users with increasingly powerful wireless devices and then determines the spectrum availability by combining the collected spectrum-sensing reports. The realization of this promising architecture faces many security and privacy challenges such as the location privacy of involved mobile users and the secure combination of possibly forged spectrum-sensing reports. In this talk, I will first discuss our approach enabling mobile users to conduct cooperative spectrum sensing while protecting their location privacy from the SSP and any other entity. Then I will present a novel secure combination scheme whereby the SSP can make a correct decision about the spectrum availability even when most spectrum-sensing reports it receives are forged. Finally, I will briefly discuss some of the ongoing research in crowdsourcing-based cooperative spectrum sensing.
Bio:
Rui Zhang is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Hawaii. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Arizona State University in 2013, his B.E. degree in Communication Engineering and the M.E. degree in Communication and Information Systems both from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 2001 and 2005, respectively. From 2005 to 2007, he was a software engineer at UTStarcom, Shenzhen. His research interests are the security and privacy issues in wireless/mobile networks and systems, wireless/mobile health, smart grids, social networks, and cloud computing.