Consensus-Before-Talk: Distributed Dynamic Spectrum Access via Distributed Spectrum Ledger Technology

TL;DR

This paper introduces Consensus-Before-Talk (CBT), a distributed spectrum access method using ledger technology to achieve collision-free access with lower latency than traditional schemes, especially under heavy traffic.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel distributed spectrum etiquette architecture leveraging DLT to enable consensus-based, collision-free spectrum access with latency analysis and validation.

Findings

CBT achieves lower end-to-end latency under heavy secondary user traffic.

The latency analysis confirms the efficiency of the consensus mechanism.

Numerical evaluations validate the superiority of CBT over LBT in severe traffic conditions.

Abstract

This paper proposes Consensus-Before-Talk (CBT), a spectrum etiquette architecture leveraged by distributed ledger technology (DLT). In CBT, secondary users' spectrum access requests reach a consensus in a distributed way, thereby enabling collision-free distributed dynamic spectrum access. To achieve this consensus, the secondary users need to pay for the extra request exchanging delays. Incorporating the consensus delay, the end-to-end latency under CBT is investigated. Both the latency analysis and numerical evaluation validate that the proposed CBT achieves the lower end-to-end latency particularly under severe secondary user traffic, compared to the Listen-Before-Talk (LBT) benchmark scheme.