Privacy-Preserving Distributed Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Multi-Channel Cognitive Radio MANETs

Location privacy preservation in multi-channel cognitive radio mobile ad hoc networks (CR-MANETs) is a challenging issue, where the network does not rely on a trusted central entity to impose privacy-preserving protocols. Furthermore, even though the multi-channel CR-MANETs have numerous advantages, utilization of multiple channels degrades the location privacy, by disclosing more information about CRs. In this paper, location privacy is studied for cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) in multi-channel CR-MANETs. We first quantify the location privacy. Then, we propose a new privacy-preserving distributed cooperative spectrum sensing scheme for multi-channel CR-MANETs. We design a new anonymization method based on random manipulation of the exchanged signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Afterwards, a coalitional game-theoretic distributed channel assignment is proposed to maximize location privacy and sensing performance over each channel in the network. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can enhance sensing performance and location privacy over multiple channels.