On the secrecy capacity of multi-cell uplink networks with opportunistic scheduling

In this paper, we propose a novel user scheduling that achieves the optimal multi-user diversity gain in multi-cell uplink networks with multiple eavesdroppers. In the proposed scheduling, each base station (BS) selects a certain user based on two pre-determined thresholds (i.e., scheduling criteria). The first threshold is related to the amount of generating interference of the users to other BSs and the second threshold is related to the maximum amount of information overheard by the eavesdroppers in the network. Simulation results show that the proposed scheduling significantly outperforms the other scheduling algorithms in terms of secrecy throughput. Note that the proposed scheduling can operate with a distributed manner when time division duplex is adopted, i.e., no coordination among different BSs is needed.