Secure Relay Selection With Outdated CSI in Cooperative Wireless Vehicular Networks: A DQN Approach

Cooperative communications is a core research area in wireless vehicular networks (WVNs), thanks to its capability to provide a certain degree of fading mitigation and to improve spectral efficiency. In a cooperative scenario, the intercept probability of the system can be reduced by optimizing the relay selection scheme in order to select the optimal relay from a set of available relays for data transmission. However, due to the mobility of WVNs, the best relay is often selected in practice based on outdated channel state information (CSI), which in turn affects the overall system performance. Therefore, there is a need for a robust relay selection scheme (RSS) that guarantees a satisfactory overall achievable performance in the presence of an outdated CSI. Motivated by this and considering the advantageous features of autoregressive moving average (ARMA), the proposed contribution models a cooperative vehicular communication scenario with relay selection as a Markov decision process (MDP) and proposes two deep Q-networks (DQNs), namely DQN-RSS and DQN-RSS-ARMA. In the proposed framework, two deep reinforcement learning (RL)-based RSS are trained based on the intercept probability, aiming to select the optimal vehicular relay from a set of multiple relays. We then compare the proposed RSS with the conventional methods and evaluate the performance of the network from the security point of view. Simulation results show that DQN-RSS and DQN-RSS-ARMA perform better than conventional approaches, as they reduce intercept probability by approximately 15% and 30%, respectively, compared to the standard ARMA approach.