Secure Rate Control and Statistical QoS Provisioning for Cloud-Based IoT Networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) facilitates physical things to detect, interact, and execute activities on-demand, enabling a variety of applications such as smart homes and smart cities. However, it also creates many potential risks related to data security and privacy vulnerabilities on the physical layer of cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) networks. These can include different types of physical attacks such as interference, eavesdropping, and jamming. As a result, quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning gets difficult for cloud-based IoT. This paper investigates the statistical QoS provisioning of a four-node cloud-based IoT network under security, reliability, and latency constraints by relying on the effective capacity model to offer enhanced QoS for IoT networks. Alice and Bob are legitimate nodes trying to communicate with secrecy in the considered scenario, while an eavesdropper Eve overhears their communication. Meanwhile, a friendly jammer, which emits artificial noise, is used to degrade the wiretap channel. By taking advantage of their multiple antennas, Alice implements transmit antenna selection, while Bob and Eve perform maximum-ratio combining. We further assume that Bob decodes the artificial noise perfectly and thus removes its contribution by implementing perfect successive interference cancellation. A closed-form expression for an alternative formulation of the outage probability, conditioned upon the successful transmission of a message, is obtained by considering adaptive rate allocation in an ON-OFF transmission. The data arriving at Alice’s buffer are modeled by considering four different Markov sources to describe different IoT traffic patterns. Then, the problem of secure throughput maximization is addressed through particle swarm optimization by considering the security, latency, and reliability constraints. Our results evidence the considerable improvements on the delay violation probability by increasing the number of antennas at Bob under strict buffer constraints.