Reliable and Secure Short-Packet Communications in Untrusted Diamond Relay Networks

This paper investigates short-packet communications over a diamond relay network with two untrusted relays (potential eavesdroppers) with the purpose of guaranteeing reliability and security simultaneously. As the performance metric, reliable-and-secure probability (RSP), considering both reliability and secrecy, is defined from the perspective of physical layer security. An analytical approach is proposed to investigate reliability and security by taking into account the characteristics of the short-packet transmission. RSPs are numerically obtained via the analytical framework by utilizing the source-channel separation theorem for the source-to-relay transmission and chief executive officer (CEO) problem analyses for the relay-to-destination transmission. It is found that the optimal RSP is achieved when the contributions from the source-relay transmission and the relay-destination transmission are balanced, even without support from a friendly jamming signal or artificial noise.