Security-Aware Device-to-Device Communications Underlaying Cellular Networks

With the steep growth of mobile population and wireless multimedia data in recent years, Device-to-Device (D2D) communications are promising data offloading solutions and spectrum efficiency enhancement methods. They have drawn considerable attention in communication research community. In this chapter, we firstly give an overview of D2D communications from the aspects of their characteristics, application scenarios, and research topics. Then, the security architectures, threat model, and security requirements of D2D communications are presented. Finally, the organization of the book is depicted for a comprehensive understanding for all the content.

In Device-to-Device (D2D) communications, data transmission is a very important application. However, due to the fact that the connections happen directly between the proximity devices, they may subject to variety security threats such as data modification and fabrication, privacy violation. This chapter proposes a secure data sharing protocol through a cryptography approach. Specifically, digital signature combing with mutual authentication between the evolved NodeB (eNB) and users guarantees the entity authentication, data authority and integrity, transmission non-repudiation as well as traceability. Meanwhile, data confidentiality is achieved through the symmetric encryption. The key hint transmission between the eNB and user equipments (UEs) realizes reception non-repudiation. Free-riding attack is detected by keeping a record of the data sharing behaviors for the UEs in the eNB thus the system availability is improved.

Due to the explosive growth of mobile data traffic, wireless multimedia content delivery turns to be an important application in D2D communications. In this chapter, we focus on the security for wireless multimedia transmission over D2D communications. The existing security methods consider physical-layer and application-layer security technologies independently while both of them have significant impact on security performance. Thus, we propose a joint framework involving both the physical-layer and application-layer security technologies. It is well known that the network resources are expected to be utilized efficiently by exploiting the secrecy capacity and signal processing technologies at the physical-layer as well as the authentication and watermarking strategies at the application-layer. We also design a novel network-aware security protection strategy which is implemented in a distributed manner. It achieves a tradeoff between the security level and communication overhead, which facilitates its deployment in large-scale wireless multimedia systems.

In D2D communications the users work both as servers and clients, thus cooperation stimulation is an important technology as the system availability mainly depends on the cooperation degree of the users. Considering the particular features of D2D communication, resource-exchange-based incentive mechanism is a superior choice as it neither relies on the use of tamper-proof hardware nor monitors other’s behavior as implemented in CB or RB. We propose a resource-exchange-based cooperation stimulation scheme in this chapter. Specifically, the users obtain their demanding contents at the cost of sending contents to their counterparts. By this method, contents are disseminated cooperatively with D2D communications in the network. Furthermore, as multimedia dominates the contents with Quality of Experience (QoE) as a key measurement, the cooperation stimulation mechanism is constructed for maximizing user QoE characterized by Mean Opinion Score (MOS). In the proposed scheme, the users compute their transmitter MOS and receiver MOS, and send them to the content provider (CP). Then, the CP formulates a weighted directed graph based on the network topology and connection MOS. By factorizing the graph, the content dissemination scheme is designed according to the 1-Factor with the maximum weight. Additionally, in order to realize cheat-proof, a debt mechanism is introduced in the scheme.

In this chapter, we summarize the main ideas of the brief and present the future research directions for security-aware D2D communications.