Differential privacy has become the dominant standard in the research community for strong privacy protection. There has been a flood of research into query answering algorithms that meet this standard. Algorithms are becoming increasingly complex, and in particular, the performance of many emerging algorithms is data dependent, meaning the distribution of the noise added to query answers may change depending on the input data. Theoretical analysis typically only considers the worst case, making empirical study of average case performance increasingly important.In this paper we propose a set of evaluation principles which we argue are essential for sound evaluation. Based on these principles we propose DPBENCH, a novel evaluation framework for standardized evaluation of privacy algorithms. We then apply our benchmark to evaluate algorithms for answering 1-and 2-dimensional range queries. The result is a thorough empirical study of 15 published algorithms on a total of 27 datasets that offers new insights into algorithm behavior-in particular the influence of dataset scale and shape-and a more complete characterization of the state of the art. Our methodology is able to resolve inconsistencies in prior empirical studies and place algorithm performance in context through comparison to simple baselines. Finally, we pose open research questions which we hope will guide future algorithm design.

Energy harvesting from the surroundings is a promising solution to perpetually power-up wireless sensor communications. This paper presents a data-driven approach of finding optimal transmission policies for a solar-powered sensor node that attempts to maximize net bit rates by adapting its transmission parameters, power levels and modulation types, to the changes of channel fading and battery recharge. We formulate this problem as a discounted Markov decision process (MDP) framework, whereby the energy harvesting process is stochastically quantized into several representative solar states with distinct energy arrivals and is totally driven by historical data records at a sensor node. With the observed solar irradiance at each time epoch, a mixed strategy is developed to compute the belief information of the underlying solar states for the choice of transmission parameters. In addition, a theoretical analysis is conducted for a simple on-off policy, in which a predetermined transmission parameter is utilized whenever a sensor node is active. We prove that such an optimal policy has a threshold structure with respect to battery states and evaluate the performance of an energy harvesting node by analyzing the expected net bit rate. The design framework is exemplified with real solar data records, and the results are useful in characterizing the interplay that occurs between energy harvesting and expenditure under various system configurations. Computer simulations show that the proposed policies significantly outperform other schemes with or without the knowledge of short-term energy harvesting and channel fading patterns.

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Abstract-Many spectrum sensing methods and dynamic access algorithms have been proposed to improve the secondary users' opportunities of utilizing the primary users' spectrum resources. However, few of them have considered to integrate the design of spectrum sensing and access algorithms together by taking into account the mutual influence between them. In this paper, we propose to jointly analyze the spectrum sensing and access problem by studying two scenarios: synchronous scenario where the primary network is slotted and non-slotted asynchronous scenario. Due to selfish nature, secondary users tend to act selfishly to access the channel without contribution to the spectrum sensing. Moreover, they may take out-of-equilibrium strategies because of the uncertainty of others' strategies. To model the complicated interactions among secondary users, we formulate the joint spectrum sensing and access problem as an evolutionary game and derive the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) that no one will deviate from. Furthermore, we design a distributed learning algorithm for the secondary users to converge to the ESS. With the proposed algorithm, each secondary user senses and accesses the primary channel with the probabilities learned purely from its own past utility history, and finally achieves the desired ESS. Simulation results shows that our system can quickly converge to the ESS and such an ESS is robust to the sudden unfavorable deviations of the selfish secondary users.Index Terms-Cognitive radio, joint spectrum sensing and access, evolutionary game theory, replicator dynamics.