PP-SPEC: Securing Spectrum Allocation for Internet of Things

The explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) is posing a high pressure on the spectrum resources. Dynamic spectrum allocation is an effective solution for supporting massive IoT devices with limited spectrum resources, often implemented in the form of spectrum auction. Among diverse auction formats, double auctions feature multiple buyers and multiple sellers, which is applicable to a wide range of IoT scenarios. Nevertheless, the existing double auction mechanisms mostly focus on the design of truthfulness and ignore the importance of privacy preservation. Hence, in this article, we propose PP-SPEC, a truthful and privacy-preserving double auction mechanism that takes spatial reuse, spectrum heterogeneity, and multiminded bidders into account, and provides full privacy in terms of asking prices, bidding values, and locations. To tackle the challenge of privacy-preserving comparison over ciphertext field, we carefully designed a set of generic privacy-preserving ciphertext comparison protocols (PIC), including basic PIC (B-PIC) and extended PIC (E-PIC), by integrating additive homomorphic encryption and garbled circuits. Furthermore, we have theoretically proved the truthfulness and security of PP-SPEC. We have implemented and evaluated PP-SPEC, whose experimental results show high performance and practicability of PP-SPEC for real-life applications.