Adaptive Base Station Cooperation for Physical Layer Security in Two-Cell Wireless Networks

We study physical layer security in two-cell wireless networks in which a base station (Alice) intends to send a confidential message to a legitimate user (Bob) with the help of a cooperative base station (Charlie), in the presence of an eavesdropper (Eve). Adaptive base station cooperation is explored to secure communication between Alice and Bob, and ensure the desired quality of service (QoS) at Charlie’s user. In particular, we consider two different scenarios where the channel state information of Eve is perfectly and statistically known, respectively. In either scenario, we provide a cooperative transmission scheme for secrecy rate maximization, subject to both security and QoS constraints. Unlike the conventional cooperative security with a fixed transmission scheme, we propose a mechanism for transmit strategy adaptation with security protection. Specifically, the cooperative transmission is replaced by a cooperative jamming scheme if either security or QoS constraint is not satisfied. Our design enables adaptive secure transmission, and thus is flexible and environment-adaptive. Moreover, numerical results confirm that our scheme is efficient in power resource utilization.