Power Allocation for Intelligent Interference Exploitation Aided Physical-Layer Security in OFDM-Based Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

In this paper, we consider an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based heterogeneous cellular network consisting of a macro cell and a small cell, where a macro-cell base station (MBS) and a small-cell base station (SBS) communicate with respective macro-cell user (MU) and small-cell user (SU) with the existence of a common eavesdropper across different OFDM subcarriers. In order to make full use of the mutual interference between MBS and SBS against eavesdropping, an artificially designed signal is emitted at MBS to cancel out the interference received at MU as well as to interfere with the common eavesdropper at each subcarriers. For the purpose of further improving the secrecy performance, a sum secrecy rate (SSR) of OFDM-based heterogeneous cellular networks is maximized by optimizing the power allocation between MBS and SBS across different OFDM subcarriers when the eavesdropper owns the global instantaneous channel state information (ICSI), thus called ICSI based SSR maximization (ICSI-SSRM). As for the case when the ICSI of wiretap channels is unknown, we propose a statistical CSI based SSR maximization (SCSI-SSRM) scheme, where the statistical characteristics of channels from MBS and SBS to eavesdropper are employed to optimally allocate powers of MBS and SBS across different subcarriers under the constraint of MBS's total transmit power. The formulated ICSI-SSRM and SCSI-SSRM problems are all non-convex due to form of the difference between two-convex (D.C.) functions. Thus, we utilize the D.C. approximation approach to respectively convert original optimization problems into convex problems. Moreover, iterative optimal power allocation algorithms for ICSI-SSRM and SCSI-SSRM schemes are also presented to obtain their respective SSR values. Simulation results illustrate that the ICSI-SSRM and SCSI-SSRM algorithms can converge to their optimal values, which confirms the correctness and validation of the proposed algorithms. In addition, numerical results are also given to show that the ICSI-SSRM and SCSI-SSRM schemes outperform conventional power allocation methods in terms of their SSR performance.