Achieving Bilateral Utility Maximization and Location Privacy Preservation in Database-Driven Cognitive Radio Networks

Database-driven cognitive radio has been well recognized as an efficient way to reduce interference between Primary Users (PUs) and Secondary Users (SUs). In database-driven cognitive radio, PUs and SUs must provide their locations to enable dynamic channel allocation, which raises location privacy breach concern. Previous studies only focus on unilateral privacy preservation, i.e., Only PUs´ or SUs´ privacy is preserved. In this paper, we propose to protect bilateral location privacy of a PU and an SU. The main challenge lies in how to coordinate the PU and SU to maximize their utility provided that their location privacy is protected. We first introduce a quantitative method to calculate both PU´s and SU´s location privacy, and then design a novel privacy preserving Utility Maximization protocol (UMax). UMax allows for both PU and SU to adjust their privacy preserving levels and optimize transmit power iteratively to achieve the maximum utility. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that our proposed mechanism can efficiently increase the utility of both PU and SU while preserving their location privacy.