Pilot Distortion Design for ToA Obfuscation in Uplink OFDM Communication

Paper in proceeding, 2026

We study uplink orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) pilot distortion to deliberately obfuscate time-of-arrival (ToA) estimation at a single base station while preserving communication performance. We design a complex persubcarrier distortion vector that increases sidelobes of the mismatched ambiguity function (MAF) relative to its mainlobe, using two objectives: the sidelobe-to-peak level ratio and the integrated sidelobe level. The design is subject to a transmit-power budget and a proximity (dissimilarity) constraint around the communication-optimal pilot. Communication impact is quantified by a capacity-motivated lower bound obtained from the linear minimum mean-squared error error covariance with a mismatched channel estimate. The resulting generalized fractional program is solved with Dinkelbach's transform and a difference-of-convex update that yields a closed-form Karush-Kuhn-Tucker step. Simulations on a single-input single-output OFDM link show that the optimized distortions raise MAF sidelobes and degrade delay estimation, as validated by a mismatched maximumlikelihood ToA estimator, while incurring only marginal capacity loss over a broad signal-to-noise ratio range. The method requires no protocol changes or artificial path injection and provides a signal-level mechanism to control ToA observability under communication constraints.