Trade Reliability for Security: Leakage-Failure Probability Minimization for Machine-Type Communications in URLLC

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 41, pp. 2123–2137

Abstract

How to provide information security while fulfilling ultra reliability and low-latency requirements is one of the major concerns for enabling the next generation of ultra-reliable and low-latency communications service (xURLLC), specially in machine-type communications. In this work, we investigate the reliability-security tradeoff by defining the leakage-failure probability, a metric that jointly characterizes both reliability and security performances for short-packet transmissions. We discover that the system performance can be enhanced, counter-intuitively, by allocating fewer resources for the transmission with finite blocklength (FBL) codes. In order to solve the corresponding optimization problem for the joint resource allocation, we propose an optimization framework, that leverages lower-bounded approximations for the decoding error probability in the FBL regime. We characterize the convexity of the reformulated problem and establish an efficient iterative searching method, the convergence of which is guaranteed. To show the extendability of the framework, we further discuss the blocklength allocation schemes with practical requirements of reliable-secure performance, as well as the transmissions with the statistical channel state information (CSI). Numerical results verify the accuracy of the proposed approach and demonstrate the reliability-security tradeoff under various setups.

Authors 5

1. Yao Lin Zhu Aachen Chair of Information Theory and Data Analytics

   Wuhan University · RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

   Chair of Information Theory and Data Analytics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

2. Xiaopeng Yuan Aachen Chair of Information Theory and Data Analytics

   Wuhan University · RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

   Chair of Information Theory and Data Analytics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

3. Yulin Hu Aachen Chair of Information Theory and Data Analytics

   Wuhan University · RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

   Chair of Information Theory and Data Analytics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

4. Rafael F. Schaefer

   Technische Universität Dresden

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair of Information Theory and Machine Learning, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

5. Anke Schmeink Aachen Chair of Information Theory and Data Analytics

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair of Information Theory and Data Analytics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany