Location Privacy-Enabled Beamforming in ISAC Scenarios

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology enables simultaneous environmental perception and data transmission in wireless networks; however, it also exposes user location to receivers. In this paper, we introduce a novel beamforming framework guided by the proposed privacy metric direction of arrival obfuscation ratio (DAOR) to protect transmitter location privacy in ISAC scenarios. Unlike previous approaches, we do not suppress the line-of-sight (LOS) component while reshaping the angular power distribution so that a false direction appears dominant at the receiver. We derive closed-form bounds on the feasible DAOR via generalized eigenvalue analysis and formulate an achievable rate-maximization problem under the DAOR constraint. The resulting problem is non-convex, which is efficiently solved using semidefinite relaxation, eigenmode selection, and optimal power allocation. A suboptimal design strategy is also proposed with reduced complexity. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed DAOR-based beamformer achieves a trade-off between location privacy and communication rate without nullifying the LOS path. Results also show that a suboptimal design achieves a near-optimal communication rate with nearly an 85% reduction in computation time at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 10 dB.