D2D-enabled resource management in secrecy-ensured 5G and beyond Heterogeneous networks

Abstract Integration of Device-to-Device communication in 5G Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) promises to increase resource utilization and spectrum efficiency (SE). However, the broadcast nature of wireless communication makes it vulnerable to an eavesdropper, who can steal useful information from the transmission channel. Hence, ensuring secure communication for both cellular users (CUs) and D2D pairs is the need of the time. In this paper, we study the optimization problem of resource allocation in 5G and beyond wireless networks to maximize the secrecy rate of both CUs and D2D links from the physical layer security perspective. We consider multiple eavesdroppers overhearing the CUs and D2D pairs. Two optimization problems are formulated: one considering separate channels for CUs and D2D user (DU), and second, considering the shared channel between CU and DU. The nature of the formulated problems is mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem and to solve it, we propose an ϵ -optimal based successive linearization algorithm. This algorithm decomposes our original problem into finite sub-problem branches and solves each separately. Simulation results show that the proposed technique can significantly improve the secrecy rate, throughput, and energy efficiency of the network especially in the case of separate channels for CUs and DUs.