Integrated Cross-Layer Security for Reliable Service Provisioning with Guaranteed Robustness

The advancement of wireless communication technology and the rise of user-centric applications have intensified demands for extensive and diverse service provisioning in future networks, including security as a service. In this context, security will evolve from an isolated function to a fundamental component of service, integrated into the comprehensive service provisioning process. However, the unpredictable physical layer security cannot guarantee robustness, and high extra overhead caused by most digital schemes and situation-irrelevant security provisioning results in a deterioration in quality of service (QoS). To address this issue, this paper investigates a security-integrated service provisioning scheme. Specifically, a security-integrated sparse code multiple access (SI-SCMA) scheme is proposed to efficiently integrate physical layer authentication into the code-book allocation process with low overhead. To guarantee the security robustness that cannot be fully achieved by the physical layer scheme, a cryptographic encryption scheme is proposed to further enhance the security strength on the user’s specific demand. To precisely characterize users’ requirements of security provisioning, a novel system utility model including efficient data rate, cross-layer security capacity, and energy consumption is designed, and a system utility maximization problem is formulated to guide the determination of resource allocation. To solve the formulated problem, a joint resource allocation and encryption design algorithm (JSEA) is developed. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed authentication mechanism and JSEA.