Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) emerging as an effective way of improving the utilization of the scarce spectrum has attracted great attention in the communication field. A key challenge in DSA is to perform an efficient spectrum sensing and sharing mechanism. In this paper, aiming at achieving a maximal spectrum utilization, we propose a privacy-aware crowdsourced spectrum sensing and multi-user sharing mechanism for DSA. Particularly, in the sensing stage, the advanced mobile crowd sensing is

more »

... apted to economically provide sufficient candidate sensing helpers for a sensing requestor. Considering the individual rationality and energy consumption, an incentive mechanism based on both monetary and social motivation is designed to motivate the finial participations of the sensing helpers. Moreover, with the increasing attention to individual privacy, a social network and location-based k-anonymity grouping algorithm are proposed to prevent each helper's privacy being attacked by the malicious requestor or mobile users. Then, for a sensing requestor, aiming at achieving a target detection performance with minimal payment, a truthful reverse auction-based winning group selection algorithm is designed. Furthermore, in the transmitting stage, a realistic scenario is considered where multiple transmitters may discover the same idle spectrum based on sensing helpers' detections and will transmit data simultaneously. Thus, we model this problem as a potential-game-based multi-user transmission mechanism where all the transmitters act as game players and will jointly adjust their transmission powers to maximize the global throughput. Accordingly, we also take advantage of an improved differential evolution algorithm for obtaining a better equilibrium solution in a decentralized way. Both the theoretical analysis and the simulation results prove the rationality and superiority of our proposed algorithms. INDEX TERMS Privacy aware, mobile crowd sensing, incentive mechanism, dynamic spectrum access, game theory.