User-Cell Association for Security and Energy Efficiency in Ultra-Dense Heterogeneous Networks

The last decades have been characterized by an exponential increase in digital services. The demand is foreseen to further increase in the next years, and mobile networks will have to mandatorily supply connections to enable digital services with very different requirements, from ultra high speed to ultra low latency. The deployment and the coexistence of cells of different size, from femto to macro, will be one of the key elements for providing such pervasive wireless connection: the ultra dense networks (UDN) paradigm. How to associate users and base stations is one of the most investigated research topics. Many criteria can be drawn, from minimization of power consumption to optimization of throughput. In this paper we propose a new utility to optimize two of the most important features of future mobile connection: security and energy consumption. By using our utility it is possible to jointly select the base station to be activated in a UDN, and associate users to the base stations with the aim of maximizing the secure throughput by spending the minimum energy. Moreover, we propose a heuristic that allows to achieve performance very close to the optimal one with reduced complexity. Effectiveness of the proposed approach is proved by means of comparison with benchmark approaches.

[1]  Fan Liu,et al.  Energy- and Cost-Efficient Physical Layer Security in the Era of IoT: The Role of Interference , 2020, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[2]  Tanesh Kumar,et al.  6G White paper: Research challenges for Trust, Security and Privacy , 2020, ArXiv.

[3]  Wessam Ajib,et al.  Base Station Operation and User Association in HetNets: Complexity and Heuristic Algorithms , 2017, GLOBECOM 2017 - 2017 IEEE Global Communications Conference.

[4]  Xiaoming Chen,et al.  Energy-Efficient Optimization for Physical Layer Security in Multi-Antenna Downlink Networks with QoS Guarantee , 2013, IEEE Communications Letters.

[5]  Maria Grazia Scutellà,et al.  Robust green Wireless Local Area Networks: A matheuristic approach , 2020, J. Netw. Comput. Appl..

[6]  Mengyu Liu,et al.  Power Allocation for Secure SWIPT Systems With Wireless-Powered Cooperative Jamming , 2017, IEEE Communications Letters.

[7]  Xiaohu You,et al.  Utility-Energy Efficiency Oriented User Association With Power Control in Heterogeneous Networks , 2018, IEEE Wireless Communications Letters.

[8]  Shahrokh Valaee,et al.  A New Heuristic Algorithm for Energy and Spectrum Efficient User Association in 5G Heterogeneous Networks , 2020, 2020 IEEE 31st Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications.

[9]  Mohammad Ayoub Khan,et al.  Toward Green Communication in 6G-Enabled Massive Internet of Things , 2021, IEEE Internet of Things Journal.

[10]  Lifeng Wang,et al.  Safeguarding 5G wireless communication networks using physical layer security , 2015, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[11]  Emil Björnson,et al.  Multiobjective Signal Processing Optimization: The way to balance conflicting metrics in 5G systems , 2014, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

[12]  Ramjee Prasad,et al.  Cooperative Wireless Communications and Physical Layer Security: State-of-the-Art , 2012, J. Cyber Secur. Mobil..

[13]  Xiangyun Zhou,et al.  A New Metric for Measuring the Security of an Environment: The Secrecy Pressure , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[14]  Simone Morosi,et al.  On the trade-off between Secrecy and Energy-Efficiency in Multi-Layer Cellular Networks , 2019, 2019 IEEE 5th International forum on Research and Technology for Society and Industry (RTSI).

[15]  Rudolf Mathar,et al.  Secrecy Energy Efficiency of MIMOME Wiretap Channels With Full-Duplex Jamming , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Communications.

[16]  Shijie Wang,et al.  Physical Layer security in Two-tier Heterogeneous Cellular Networks over Nakagami Channel during Uplink Phase , 2018, 2018 13th APCA International Conference on Control and Soft Computing (CONTROLO).

[17]  Hsiao-Hwa Chen,et al.  Physical Layer Security for Next Generation Wireless Networks: Theories, Technologies, and Challenges , 2017, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

[18]  Victor C. M. Leung,et al.  Energy-Efficient Joint User Association and Power Allocation in a Heterogeneous Network , 2020, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[19]  Zahra Dehghan Shabani,et al.  Energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, information and communications technology, and gross domestic product in Iranian economic sectors: A panel causality analysis , 2019, Energy.

[20]  Simone Morosi,et al.  A Metric for Secrecy-Energy Efficiency Tradeoff Evaluation in 3GPP Cellular Networks , 2016, Inf..

[21]  Enrico Del Re,et al.  On the trade‐off between energy saving and number of switchings in green cellular networks , 2017, Trans. Emerg. Telecommun. Technol..

[22]  Na Li,et al.  Multi-Objective Optimization for Full-Duplex SWIPT Systems , 2020, IEEE Access.

[23]  Cheng-Xiang Wang,et al.  5G Ultra-Dense Cellular Networks , 2015, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[24]  Xiaofeng Tao,et al.  Secrecy Outage Probability in Multi-RAT Heterogeneous Networks , 2016, IEEE Communications Letters.

[25]  Jeffrey G. Andrews,et al.  Are we approaching the fundamental limits of wireless network densification? , 2015, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[26]  Tao Jiang,et al.  Pervasive intelligent endogenous 6G wireless systems: Prospects, theories and key technologies , 2020, Digit. Commun. Networks.

[27]  Hui Tian,et al.  Energy-Efficient Relay Selection Scheme for Physical Layer Security in Cognitive Radio Networks , 2015 .

[28]  Carlo Mannino,et al.  GUB Covers and Power-Indexed Formulations for Wireless Network Design , 2010, Manag. Sci..

[29]  Symeon Chatzinotas,et al.  Secrecy energy efficiency optimization for MISO and SISO communication networks , 2015, 2015 IEEE 16th International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC).

[30]  Shi Jin,et al.  A New Look at Physical Layer Security, Caching, and Wireless Energy Harvesting for Heterogeneous Ultra-Dense Networks , 2017, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[31]  Meng Li,et al.  On the Maximization of Secrecy Energy Efficiency in Full-Duplex Bidirectional System With SWIPT , 2019, 2019 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC).

[32]  Matthieu R. Bloch,et al.  Fundamentals of Physical Layer Security , 2013 .

[33]  Eduard A. Jorswieck,et al.  Confidential and energy-efficient communications by physical layer security , 2017 .

[34]  Holger Claussen,et al.  Towards 1 Gbps/UE in Cellular Systems: Understanding Ultra-Dense Small Cell Deployments , 2015, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

[35]  Lei Chen,et al.  A New Computational Approach for Maximum Link Activation in Wireless Networks under the SINR Model , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[36]  Muhammad Ali Imran,et al.  How much energy is needed to run a wireless network? , 2011, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[37]  Rosdiadee Nordin,et al.  Survey of Green Radio Communications Networks: Techniques and Recent Advances , 2013, J. Comput. Networks Commun..

[38]  Chanjun Chun,et al.  Optimal User Association Strategy for Large-Scale IoT Sensor Networks with Mobility on Cloud RANs , 2019, Sensors.

[39]  Kai Yang,et al.  Energy-Efficient Base Station Association and Beamforming for Multi-Cell Multiuser Systems , 2020, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[40]  Shijie Wang,et al.  Secure User Association in Two-Tier Heterogeneous Cellular Networks With In-Band Interference , 2018, IEEE Access.

[41]  Lorenzo Mucchi,et al.  Physical-layer security metric for user association in ultra-dense networks , 2020, 2020 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC).