Secure Information Transmission for B5G HetNets: A Robust Game Approach

This article investigates the robust secure transmission problem in two-tier B5G heterogeneous networks with multiple noncollusive eavesdroppers and users, where two types of imperfect channel state information (CSI) scenarios, i.e., instantaneous and statistic CSI scenarios, are considered. Given the two-sidedness of co-channel interference in physical-layer security and the selfishness of femtocell base stations (FBSs), an imperfect-CSI-based noncooperative game framework is proposed to maximize the profits of the macro base station (MBS) and FBSs, while guaranteeing user's Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirement in terms of outage probability. Specifically, based on the involved two CSI scenarios, the original game where the MBS and FBSs act as players is elaborated as two robust game problems. To address channel uncertainties in the objective function, the worst-case and the mean value of the channel gains are used separately. Besides, the remaining channel uncertainties embodied in the intractable outage probability constraints are treated in a unified way, i.e., the extended Bernstein approximation. The existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium (NE) are analyzed, and the sufficient condition on the uniqueness of the NE is derived. Then, two robust iterative algorithms are given to approach the robust game equilibrium. Finally, numerical results are presented to verify the theoretical analysis and show the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.