The expansion of telecommunication providers and their efforts to expand network coverage in Sri Lanka has led to an alarming increase in Radio Frequency (RF) radiation exposure. This heightened exposure has raised concerns about its potential adverse effects on human health. Despite the country's growing number of cancer cases, no apparent cause has been identified. This research aims to identify areas exposed to harmful RF radiation levels through the innovative application of blockchain technology. The methodology involves measuring RF radiation in densely populated locations and implementing a blockchain-based spectral power misuse detection system via mobile networks. This system notifies users of harmful RF radiation exposure through an Android app. In this system, the collected data is first clustered and then aggregated after removing potential “outlier” data points, before adding the data to the blockchain. These two steps are important to increase the performance of the blockchain network, which is evaluated based on performance metrics, including success rate, latency, throughput, and memory usage of the blockchain. The data is analyzed in the blockchain network to detect if there are harmful signal levels in the country and to alert the users if there are any.

Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) addresses the underutilized spectrum allocation issues associated with static spectrum allocation. Blockchain is a critical enabler for implementing a DSA system because it allows untrusted parties to conduct business, such as spectrum buying and selling, without the involvement of a trusted third party. A blockchain system is implemented using the Proof-of-Sense consensus algorithm, which is designed to facilitate DSA while also providing several additional benefits, such as spectrum data collection.

Optimal use of scarce radio spectrum is essential in the proliferation of beyond 5G networks, and promising blockchain technology offers various benefits for the spectrum management. However, existing blockchain-based solutions are expensive, nonoptimized, and lack spectrum fraud detection. This article proposes a novel consensus mechanism for a blockchain-based dynamic spectrum access (DSA) system. The proposed “Proof-of-Sense” consensus mechanism operates based on spectrum sensing procedures rather than cryptographic calculations. It is specially designed to address fraudulent/unauthorized access to the spectrum by analyzing the sensed spectrum data. The core of the consensus mechanism is a cryptographic key sharing mechanism inspired by Shamir’s secret sharing scheme. Moreover, the proposed DSA system can enable different microservices, such as automated spectrum auctions, payment and penalty handling, and spectrum fraud detection. A proof of concept based on experimental approaches coupled with Matlab simulations is presented to analyze the performance of the proposed consensus mechanism.