Enhancing Privacy in LTE Paging System Using Physical Layer Identification

User location privacy is a growing concern in cellular networks. It has been recently shown that the paging architecture in GSM networks leaks user location information. In this paper, we first prove theoretically that LTE networks also have the same vulnerability. We then propose a solution making use of a novel signal processing technique, physical layer identification. The idea is to embed users’ unique tags onto the downlink paging signal waveforms so that the tags are stealthy and robust. We show that our scheme not only improves users’ privacy, but also saves system bandwidth.