Joint Traffic Scheduling and Resource Allocations for Traffic Offloading With Secrecy Provisioning

The recent paradigm of small cell dual-connectivity (DC) provides a promising solution to facilitate mobile users' (MUs') traffic offloading in heterogeneous networks. With DC, an MU can flexibly schedule its traffic to macrocell base station (mBS) and offload data to small-cell access point (sAP). However, a malicious node might intentionally eavesdrop the MU's offloaded data, which could lead to the secrecy exposure. In this paper, we investigate the optimal resource allocation for the MUs' traffic offloading via DC with guaranteed secrecy. First, we study a single-MU single-sAP case and formulate a joint optimization of the MU's traffic scheduling, power allocation, and bandwidth usage for traffic offloading, which aims to minimize the MU's overall resource usage including the power consumption and bandwidth usage. Although the joint optimization problem is nonconvex, we propose an efficient algorithm to obtain the optimal offloading solution. Second, by using the single-MU's optimal offloading solution, we study the multi-MU multi-sAP case and formulate an optimal offloading-selection problem that aims to maximize the overall served MUs' throughput with guaranteed secrecy, while taking into account the mBS's and sAPs' limited bandwidths and the sAPs' limited backhaul capacities. Despite the NP-hardness of the formulated offloading-selection problem, we propose an efficient heuristic algorithm to achieve the offloading-selection solution. Numerical results are provided to validate the performance gain of the proposed traffic offloading schemes with guaranteed secrecy.