Cooperative Communication and Mobility for Securing URLLC of Future Wireless Networks

Ultra-reliable low-latency communication (uRLLC) emerges as one of the three service categories in fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks, with a potential to support multiple advanced services for latency-sensitive communications. The inherent openness of the wireless environment makes security in 5G unprecedentedly urgent to be addressed. Accordingly, the physical layer security (PLS) technique exploits the randomness characteristics of the wireless channel to fulfill security and confidentiality of information transmission. Different from many current works, which ignored the significance of security in uRLLC, this paper studies secrecy improvement strategy design in uRLLC scenarios. First, we propose suitable performance metrics for evaluating PLS of uRLLC and make a compromise between reliability, latency, and security, while maximizing the network throughput. Next, we identify the key challenging issues for achieving PLS in the context of uRLLC, and discuss the role of cooperative communication and mobility in terms of possible solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to make a trade-off among reliability, security and network throughput. Simulations validate the theoretical analyses.