Joint Rate Control and Secure Resource Allocation for User-Centric Networks

Improving long-term user satisfaction in user-centric networks while ensuring an acceptable delay in the presence of an eavesdropper is an important yet challenging task. In this paper, we investigate a long-term secure resource allocation for a user-centric network. Our objective is to maximize the user's long-term average satisfaction by controlling the network-layer data arrival rate and physical-layer power allocation at access points. This objective is mainly constrained by average delay requirements, average leakage rate, and data-queue stability conditions. These constraints are challenging to directly solve because of less-analytical expressions. To tackle this issue, we introduce two virtual queues as the debt of delay and leakage data. By using a Lyapunov optimization approach, we incorporate the stabilities of these virtual queues and the real data backlog queue into the objective function as a penalty. This allows us to transform the long-term optimization problem into a sequence of short-term subproblems that can be analytically solved at each slot. Simulation reveals that the proposed long-term secure resource allocation scheme outperforms the snapshot-based method in terms of the user's long-term satisfaction.