Exploring the Trade-Off between Privacy and Coordination in Millimeter Wave Spectrum Sharing

TL;DR

This paper investigates the balance between spectrum sharing efficiency and privacy preservation in millimeter wave networks, proposing an algorithm that uses obfuscated beam information to optimize both aspects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel algorithm that balances spectrum sharing performance with privacy by sharing low-rate, obfuscated beam-related information.

Findings

The proposed method effectively manages the privacy-performance trade-off.

Obfuscation mechanisms can control information leakage.

Spectrum sharing performance can be maintained with privacy constraints.

Abstract

The synergetic gains of spectrum sharing and millimeter wave communication networks have recently attracted attention, owing to the interference canceling benefits of highly-directional beamforming in such systems. In principle, fine-tuned coordinated scheduling and beamforming can drastically reduce cross-operator interference. However, this goes at the expense of the exchange of global channel state information, which is not realistic in particular when considering inter-operator coordination. Indeed, such an exchange of information is expensive in terms of backhaul infrastructure, and besides, it raises sensitive privacy issues between otherwise competing operators. In this paper, we expose the existence of a trade-off between coordination and privacy. We propose an algorithm capable of balancing spectrum sharing performance with privacy preservation based on the sharing of a low-rate beam-related information. Such information is subject to a data obfuscation mechanism borrowed from the digital security literature so as to control the privacy, measured in terms of information-theoretical equivocation.