Preserving Operation Frequency Privacy of Incumbents in CBRS

Abstract

Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) is a novel service band in the United States, spanning 3550 – 3700 MHz, recently opened for commercial cognitive operations. The CBRS has a three tier hierarchical architecture, wherein, the topmost tier users (also called as incumbents) include military radars. The second and third tier facilitate licensed and unlicensed access to the band, respectively. The privacy of incumbents has been a major concern and different schemes have been proposed in the literature to preserve privacy of their location and operation time. However, the privacy of operation frequency of incumbents has not been suitably addressed. The operation frequency of incumbent is vulnerable to inference attacks from the adversary. For instance, an adversary can deduce the operation frequency of incumbent if a compromised device is asked to switch to another channel. Therefore, in this paper, we propose probabilistic usage of dummy incumbents on a channel and analyse the operation frequency privacy of incumbents for snapshot and time based models in the three tier CBRS system. The optimum dummy generation probability is obtained for the snapshot and time based models, varying capabilities of the adversary, and different system parameters. Finally, we verify the proposed results through simulations.