Joint subcarrier and power allocation for physical layer security in cooperative OFDMA networks

In this paper, a joint subcarrier and power allocation algorithm is proposed to improve the physical layer security in cooperative orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) networks, where several source-destination pairs and one untrusted relay are involved. The relay is friendly and intends to help these pairs to enhance their communications. However, it may be overheard by a malicious eavesdropper at the same time. To optimize the joint subcarrier and power allocation with low complexity, we divide the optimization problem into two simpler subproblems. Firstly, the subcarriers are assigned to the source-destination pairs by employing the dual approach under the assumption that the relay power is equally allocated to all the subcarriers. Then, the relay power is allocated to the subcarriers based on the alternative ascending clock auction mechanism. In addition, we prove that the two subproblems can converge after a finite number of iterations. We also find that the proposed auction is cheat-proof and, thus, can avoid the cheating behaviors in the auction process. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can effectively improve the system sum secrecy rate, and the convergence performance is also desirable.