Dynamic Spectrum Control-Assisted Secure and Efficient Transmission Scheme in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Abstract Heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs) are envisioned as a promising architecture to provide seamless wireless coverage and increase network capacity. However, the densified multi-tier network architecture introduces excessive intra- and cross-tier interference and makes HCNs vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks. In this article, a dynamic spectrum control (DSC)-assisted transmission scheme is proposed for HCNs to strengthen network security and increase the network capacity. Specifically, the proposed DSC-assisted transmission scheme leverages the idea of block cryptography to generate sequence families, which represent the transmission decisions, by performing iterative and orthogonal sequence transformations. Based on the sequence families, multiple users can dynamically occupy different frequency slots for data transmission simultaneously. In addition, the collision probability of the data transmission is analyzed, which results in closed-form expressions of the reliable transmission probability and the secrecy probability. Then, the upper and lower bounds of network capacity are further derived with given requirements on the reliable and secure transmission probabilities. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DSC-assisted scheme can outperform the benchmark scheme in terms of security performance. Finally, the impacts of key factors in the proposed DSC-assisted scheme on the network capacity and security are evaluated and discussed.