Enforce truth-telling in wireless relay networks for secure communication

To ensure security in data transmission is one of the most important issues for wireless relay networks. In this paper, we consider a cooperative network, consisting of one source node, one destination node, one eavesdropper node, and a number of relay nodes. Specifically, the source selects several relay nodes which can help forward the signal to the corresponding destination to achieve the best security performance. However, the relay nodes may have the incentive not to report their true private channel information in order to get more chance to be selected and gain more payoff from the source. We employ a self-enforcing truth-telling mechanism into the network to solve this cheating problem. By adding a transfer payoff to the total payoff of each selected relay node, we prove that each relay node would get its maximum expected payoff only when it tells the truth to the source. And then, an optimal secrecy capacity of the network can be achieved. Simulation results verify the efficiency of the proposed mechanism.