Security-Reliability Tradeoff for Distributed Antenna Systems in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

In this paper, we investigate physical-layer security for a spectrum-sharing heterogeneous cellular network comprised of a macro cell and a small cell, where a passive eavesdropper is assumed to tap the transmissions of both the macro and small cells. In the macro cell, a macro base station (MBS) equipped with multiple distributed antennas sends its confidential information to a macro user (MU) through an opportunistic transmit antenna. Meanwhile, in the small cell, a small base station (SBS) transmits to a small user (SU) over the same spectrum used by MBS. We propose an interference-canceled opportunistic antenna selection (IC-OAS) scheme to enhance the physical-layer security for the heterogeneous network. To be specific, when MBS sends its confidential message to MU through an opportunistic distributed antenna, a special signal is artificially designed and emitted at the MBS to ensure that the received interference at MU from SBS is canceled out. For comparison, the conventional interference-limited opportunistic antenna selection (IL-OAS) is considered as a benchmark. We characterize the security-reliability tradeoff (SRT) for the proposed IC-OAS and conventional IL-OAS schemes in terms of deriving their closed-form expressions of intercept probability and outage probability. Numerical results show that compared with the conventional IL-OAS, the proposed IC-OAS scheme not only brings SRT benefits to the macro cell but also has the potential of improving the SRT of small cell by increasing the number of distributed antennas. Additionally, by jointly taking into account the macro cell and small cell, an overall SRT of the proposed IC-OAS scheme is shown to be significantly better than that of the conventional IL-OAS approach in terms of a sum intercept probability versus sum outage probability.