Adaptive Resource Allocation for Secure Two-Hop Relaying Communication

In this paper, we develop novel transmission schemes for secure dual-hop Alice–Ray–Bob relaying communication over fading channels in the presence of a passive eavesdropper Eve. To control the risk of secrecy outage under unknown eavesdropper channel conditions, we impose secrecy constraint in terms of maximum allowable secrecy outage probability (SOP). We study the throughput–optimal buffer-aided adaptive relaying problem for two scenarios: 1) fixed (Alice and Ray) power allocation; and 2) adaptive power allocation. The resulting constrained optimization problems are solved using Lagrangian approach and convex optimization. In each frame, either Alice or Ray or neither is scheduled for transmission depending on the main (Alice– Ray and Ray–Bob) channel conditions. Since the transmission schemes can result in unboundedly large (queuing) delay at Ray’s buffer, we next study transmission schemes guaranteeing bounded average delay. The optimal transmission problem is formulated as an infinite horizon average reward constrained Markov decision process (MDP). Subsequently, by relying on a novel state value function approach, we show that in each frame, the solution can be obtained by solving a concave maximization problem, taking into account both the main channel conditions and the buffer state. An online transmission algorithm is developed to iteratively update the state value function, which converges to the optimal solution without requiring a-priori statistical information on the fading channels. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes over benchmark schemes under various secrecy constraint, and signalto- noise power ratio (SNR) regimes.