Combinatorial Spectrum E-Auction for 5G Heterogeneous Networks: A Zether-Based Approach

Abstract

5G heterogeneous network (HetNet) is a novel network topology that integrates various kinds of wireless access technologies such as 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE), Wi-Fi, and so on. Despite greatly improving spectrum efficiency, it poses enormous challenges to spectrum e-auction. Firstly, due to high mobility, bidders may be interested in different spectrums in terms of time or geolocation. Secondly, one's bidding value should be protected against rival bidders or adversaries to avoid vicious competition as well as privacy leakage. Thirdly, the ubiquitous HetNet requires a trustworthy distributed auction framework rather than a centralized auctioneer-based pattern. Aiming at overcoming these obstacles above, we proposed a blockchain-based combinatorial spectrum e-auction framework. Different from other blockchain-based solutions of using SGX to realize trust processing in the auction phase, we adopt Zether, a privacy-preserving smart contract, as the main building block. Besides, the bidding value is preserved from the beginning to the end, even though the time-consuming Paillier homomorphic encryption and garbled circuits are absent. We provide the auction security by leveraging Σ-Bullets, a zero-knowledge proof mechanism. Theoretical analysis and extensive evaluation also indicate that our approach is better than the state-of-the-art works in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.