Location Privacy and Spectrum Efficiency Enhancement in Spectrum Sharing Systems

In this work, we investigate the benefits of secondary user (SU) network beamforming on improving primary user (PU) location privacy in spectrum sharing systems, where the beamformer in the SU network is designed to suppress the aggregate interference to improve the location privacy of PUs. We consider two problems: improving SU network communication throughput subject to the specified PU location privacy requirements, and enhancing PU location privacy given the quality of service (QoS) requirements of SU networks. In the first problem, we provide an algorithm to achieve high data rates with the constrained PU location privacy level. Numerical results show that for a given PU location privacy requirement, the proposed scheme is able to interfere/exclude only a few SU nodes from the PU band and the network throughput can be greatly improved. In the second problem, to fully explore the potentials of SU network beamforming for enhancing PU location privacy, we propose a two-step scheme to decouple the beamforming and privacy zone design so that the PU location privacy can be improved while satisfying the SU network throughput requirement. According to numerical evaluations, the proposed scheme can maintain/achieve higher PU location privacy than the benchmark beamforming schemes while satisfying a QoS requirement for the SU network.