Secure wireless communication and optimal power control under statistical queueing constraints

In this paper, secure transmission of information over fading broadcast channels is studied in the presence of statistical queueing constraints. Effective capacity is employed as a performance metric to identify the secure throughput of the system, i.e., effective secure throughput. It is assumed that perfect channel side information (CSI) is available at both the transmitter and the receivers. Initially, the scenario in which the transmitter sends common messages to two receivers and confidential messages to one receiver is considered. For this case, the effective secure throughput region, which is the region of constant arrival rates of common and confidential messages that can be supported by the buffer-constrained transmitter and fading broadcast channel, is defined. It is proven that this effective throughput region is convex implying that time-sharing between any two viable transmission and power control strategies results in effective throughput values inside the region. Then, the optimal power control policies that achieve the boundary points of the effective secure throughput region are investigated and an algorithm for the numerical computation of the optimal power adaptation schemes is provided. Additionally, the throughput region achieved by time-division multiplexing of common and confidential messages is explored. Subsequently, the special case in which the transmitter sends only confidential messages to one receiver is addressed in more detail. For this case, effective secure throughput is formulated and two different power adaptation policies are studied. These power adaptation policies are compared with the opportunistic ones that are optimal in the absence of quality of service (QoS) constraints. It is shown that opportunistic schemes, in which data transmission with high rates and high power occurs only when the main channel is much better than the eavesdropper channel, are no longer optimal under buffer constraints, and the transmitter should send the data at a certain moderate rate and power even when the main channel strength is comparable to that of the eavesdropper channel to avoid buffer overflows.