Fair Subcarrier Allocation for Securing OFDMA in IoT Against Full-Duplex Hybrid Attacker

Abstract

Secure communication with low computational resources is a critical issue in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) implementations. It is more challenging in the presence of hybrid adversary enabled with full-duplex (FD) capability to perform eavesdropping and jamming simultaneously. In this work we aim to address this issue through optimal subcarrier allocation towards combating the FD hybrid attacker. We begin with secrecy performance analysis in a multi-user IoT system considering statistical channel state information only of all attacker links. Novel analytical expression for the exact intercept probability is derived and a closed-form approximation is also provided. We further propose an optimisation framework for fair subcarrier allocation with a novel objective of minimising maximum intercept probability among multiple users. Considering the proposed optimisation framework as a non-convex combinatorial, we propose a low-complexity sub-optimal solution by leveraging the integer linear program (ILP) structure of the problem. To reduce the complexity further, the original problem is mapped to the assignment model and solved by exploiting its special structure with graph theory tools providing an optimal solution in polynomial time. Comprehensive investigations, conducted to verify the analysis and quantify the secrecy performance, demonstrate that proposed optimal solutions yield significant enhancement in secrecy performance over relevant schemes.