Cooperative secure communication in two-hop buffer-aided networks

We propose two cooperative secure transmission schemes to protect a two-hop buffer-aided network assisted by an energy harvesting relay. In the first scheme, we assume that the knowledge of the energy harvesting and fading channels states is known in a non-causal manner (offline). In the second scheme, we assume that this knowledge is known in a causal manner (online). For both schemes, we first design an effective link selection policy by taking into account of the transmission efficiency and information security requirements. We then optimally allocate the harvested power at the relay node. For the offline scheme, we maximize the average secrecy rate under the stability constraints of the data queue and the energy queue according to the proposed link selection policy, and design a two-stage iterative algorithm to select the transmission link and allocate relay's transmit power. In the online scheme, we first model the average secrecy rate maximum problem as a Markov decision process, and then utilize the causal knowledge to select the best transmission link and optimally allocate relay's transmit power. In addition, the exact and asymptotic closed-form expressions are derived for the ergodic secrecy rate. Numerical results are presented to validate our analysis and demonstrate that the proposed schemes outperform the other buffered-aided secure transmission schemes assisted by the energy harvesting relay in terms of average secrecy rate.