Resilient regulation of wireless communication in distributed systems.

摘要

With the rapid evolution of technology and the growing use of wireless devices in our daily lives, the need for regulating the interaction between such devices increases as these devices are easily accessible for both legitimate and malicious use. Therefore, in this work we focus on the regulation of wireless communication between the various agents of an open, mobile, heterogeneous distributed system. We first address the problem of under utilization of spectrum by describing a sec- ondary spectrum marketplace model to enable the spectrum consumers to trade exclu- sive access rights to a specific portion of the spectrum (designated by the frequency band, geographic location and time period) in return for fee payment, under the con- straint of obeying the trading rules formulated by the government in a decentralized peer-to-peer fashion. We then outline an architecture in which such exclusive access rights to a portion of the spectrum could be used to regulate radio device transmission to enable proactive enforcement of the spectrum usage policies and to deter unauthorized transmissions. Next, we introduce a model of interaction control for the regulation of wireless communication in ad hoc networks using the concept of Law Governed Interaction (LGI) to regulate the dynamic behavior of interacting wireless agents. Notably, we have implemented the LGI mechanism on the ORBIT testbed and shown its usefulness by prototyping an example based on a team of police officers in an ad hoc mission to control traffic. We have demonstrated that the overhead added due to LGI would not adversely impact performance. Since this implementation allows us to control the application level messaging performed by the wireless nodes, it can be viewed as an initial proof of concept for the architecture outlined in the first part of this work (dealing with the regulation of radio device transmission). Finally, we elaborate on the notion of resiliency in stateful decentralized access control with the goal of making LGI more trustworthy to the failure and compromise of its own enforcement infrastructure, so that it can address the needs of modern wireless distributed systems in a unified manner.