Preserving the Incumbent Users’ Location Privacy in the 3.5 GHz Band

Abstract

In dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) ecosystem with non-informing incumbent users (IUs), Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) system has been proposed to detect IU activity information for a geolocation database-driven spectrum access system (SAS). SAS then allocates unused spectrum left by IUs to secondary users (SUs). However, IU location information is often highly sensitive and thus it is preferable to avoid storing ESC sensing data on a SAS, especially if the SAS is a potential target of cyber attacks. None of existing works studied the IU location privacy protection problem in such an ESC-based dynamic spectrum access (DSA) system. In this paper, we fill in the void by proposing novel privacy-preserving ESC-based dynamic spectrum access (PriDSA) schemes. We designed two versions of PriDSA that preserve IU privacy to different extent under two different adversary models, namely non-colluding honest but curious SAS model and colluding malicious SAS model. Evaluation results show that PriDSA is efficient in terms of communication and computation overhead and accurately serves SU spectrum access requests while preserving location privacy of IUs.