Wireless guard for trustworthy spectrum management

Abstract

ARA is a first-of-its-kind wireless living lab for advanced wireless in rural regions. In ARA, users can reserve programmable wireless resources, for instance, Software Defined Radios (SDRs), and wireless spectrum to perform a wide range of of experiments. Given ARA-enabled open access to programmable wireless resources, it is important to enforce proper usage of the available spectrum, thereby ensuring no user (benign or malicious) creates any harmful interference to other experimenters or any incumbent. Therefore, we develop Wireless Guard (WG), a mechanism for wireless spectrum usage monitoring. For WG, we use two approaches for enforcing the spectrum policy: (i) reactive approach and (ii) proactive approach. In this paper, we present the hardware and software architectures of the ARA WG along with the end-to-end pipeline for managing experiments in case of deviation from the spectrum usage policy. Initial evaluations show the effectiveness of WG in enforcing spectrum usage policies in ARA.