Generalized Secure Transmission Protocol for Flexible Load-Balance Control with Cooperative Relays in Two-Hop Wireless Networks

Abstract—This work considers secure transmission protocol for flexible load-balance control in two-hop relay wireless networks without the information of both eavesdropper channels and locations. The available secure transmission protocols via relay cooperation in physical layer secrecy framework cannot provide a flexible load-balance control, which may significantly limit their application scopes. This paper extends the conventional works and proposes a general transmission protocol with considering load-balance control, in which the relay is randomly selected from the first k preferable assistant relays located in the circle area with the radius r and the center at the middle between source and destination (2HR-(r, k) for short). This protocol covers the available works as special cases, like ones with the optimal relay selection (r = ∞, k = 1) and with the random relay selection (r = ∞, k = n i.e. the number of system nodes) in the case of equal path-loss, ones with relay selected from relay selection region (r ∈ (0,∞), k = 1) in the case of distancedependent path-loss. The theoretic analysis is further provided to determine the maximum number of eavesdroppers one network can tolerate to ensure a desired performance in terms of the secrecy outage probability and transmission outage probability. The analysis results also show the proposed protocol can balance load distributed among the relays by a proper setting of r and k under the premise of specified secure and reliable requirements.