LPOS: Location Privacy for Optimal Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract: Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) enable opportunistic access to the licensed channel resources by allowing unlicensed users to exploit vacant channel opportunities. One effective technique through which unlicensed users, often referred to as Secondary Users (SUs), acquire whether a channel is vacant is cooperative spectrum sensing. Despite its effectiveness in enabling CRN access, cooperative sensing suffers from location privacy threats, merely because the sensing reports that need to be exchanged among the SUs to perform the sensing task are highly correlated to the SUs' locations. In this paper, we develop a new Location Privacy for Optimal Sensing (LPOS) scheme that preserves the location privacy of SUs while achieving optimal sensing performance through voting-based sensing. In addition, LPOS is the only alternative among existing CRN location privacy preserving schemes (to the best of our knowledge) that ensures high privacy, achieves fault tolerance, and is robust against the highly dynamic and wireless nature of CRNs.