Resource Allocation for Covert Communication in D2D Content Sharing: A Matching Game Approach

Abstract

Device-to-device (D2D) content sharing, as a promising solution to rapidly growing mobile data traffic, is facing serious security issues. Hence, how to ensure its security is challenging and meaningful work. Covert communication is regarded as an emerging and cutting-edge security technique for its higher level of security and less need for channel state information (CSI), and accordingly, has attracted wide attention. However, it is not easy to directly apply covert communication to D2D content sharing to ensure both security and efficiency. In this paper, a novel covert communication model is constructed in D2D content sharing scenario, where the co-channel interference (CCI) introduced by spectrum reusing is exploited as the cover of contents so that the contents are hidden from the warden. Then, we propose a secure and efficient resource allocation scheme to ensure both security and efficiency of D2D content sharing by addressing the following two issues: 1) In order to guarantee the robustness of our scheme, covert constraints are learned by analyzing the detection performance at the warden, i.e., the security of D2D content sharing is guaranteed even considering some extremely adverse environments. 2) The joint spectrum allocation and power control is modeled as a two-sided matching problem and then reformulated as the one-to-one matching game based on the principle of mutual benefit, in order to ensure the quality of service (QoS) requirements of both D2D pairs and cellular users. Then, covert constraints guaranteed resource allocation algorithm based on Gale-Shapley algorithm is proposed. Its properties such as stability, optimality, convergence, and complexity are analyzed. The extensive simulation results are provided to verify the theoretical analyses and demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed algorithm, which has at least 7.63% performance gain compared with some existing approaches and no more than 4.83% performance loss compared with the exhaustive search. INDEX TERMS D2D content sharing, covert communication, co-channel interference, resource allocation, matching game.

A survey on energy‐efficient resource allocation schemes in device‐to‐device communication

“…Further, to escalate the energy efficiency of resource allocation, they formulated a combinatorial problem, that is, power and channel allocation among D2D links. Further, to improve content sharing, Shi et al 48 have adopted a secure and efficient resource allocation method for D2D‐enabled content distribution. However, due to the rapid increase of mobile data traffic, it encounters severe security issues.…”

QoS-Aware Traffic Offloading for Energy Efficient D2D Communication in 5G Network for IoT application

“…In D2D communication, nearby users who are closest to each other which can communicate directly by using the same resources in a cell. D2D communication also improves energy efficiency, spectral efficiency of those users who are in proximity and has capability to avoid the bottleneck in cellular networks and offload traffic from congestion [6]- [8]. In [9], authors investigated the enhancement of energy efficiency and spectral efficiency so that it improves performance in large scale D2D Networks by offloading or reducing the load of mobile traffic with the help of a framework that evaluates energy and spectral efficiency (EE and SE).…”

Trust Evaluation and Covert Communication-Based Secure Content Delivery for D2D Networks: A Hierarchical Matching Approach

“…Unfortunately, there are few researches about the application of covert communications in D2D networks. Our previous work in [23] proposes a novel covert communication model for D2D underlaying cellular networks, where the co-channel interference introduced by spectrum reusing is utilized as the cover of transmitted contents to puzzle the detection at the malicious warden. As thus, the covert communication model can be exploited to provide content delivery with a high level of security assurance.…”

“…To prevent the external attacks imposed by a malicious warden, the covert communication model in [23] is adopted in this work, where the co-channel interference introduced by uplink spectrum reusing is utilized as the cover of transmitted contents. The covert communication model is shown as Fig.…”

“…Thus, the optimal transmission power q c n ,op p j ,d i can be obtained by utilizing the one-dimensional search, and the power control matrix Q can be obtained. The details are given in our previous work [23].…”