Unequal Secrecy Protection for Untrusted Two-Way Relaying Systems: Constellation Overlapping and Noise Aggregation

Abstract

This paper studies the secure information exchange of two-way relaying systems, where two terminal users communicate bi-directionally with the assistance of an untrusted relay. Each user is assumed to have two messages with distinct priorities: high priority and low priority. The high-priority messages (HPM) are first transmitted, for which we propose a constellation overlapping scheme such that the received signals at the relay overlap with each other and a high error floor is created to prevent the untrusted relay from deciphering the information. Upon the completion of HPM exchange, each user sends its low-priority message (LPM) by superposing it onto the previously decoded HPM from the other user. By exploiting the difference between the error patterns for HPM at the terminal users and the relay, channel noises in various time slots can be aggregated at the relay to secure the LPM transmission. The symbol error probability (SEP) at the terminal users as well as the untrusted relay is analyzed, from which it is shown that HPM is guaranteed to have greater reliability and higher secrecy level than that of LPM. However, the transmission of LPM enjoys lower implementation complexity and reduced system overhead, which fully demonstrates that the message-prioritization-based unequal secrecy protection framework can realize a good performance-complexity tradeoff. Simulation results exhibit the superiority of the proposed design compared to the existing competing solutions.