Deep Q-Learning-Based Buffer-Aided Relay Selection for Reliable and Secure Communications in Two-Hop Wireless Relay Networks

Sensors (Basel). 2023 May 17;23(10):4822. doi: 10.3390/s23104822.

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of buffer-aided relay selection to achieve reliable and secure communications in a two-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) network with an eavesdropper. Due to the fading of wireless signals and the broadcast nature of wireless channels, transmitted signals over the network may be undecodable at the receiver end or have been eavesdropped by eavesdroppers. Most available buffer-aided relay selection schemes consider either reliability or security issues in wireless communications; rarely is work conducted on both reliability and security issues. This paper proposes a buffer-aided relay selection scheme based on deep Q-learning (DQL) that considers both reliability and security. By conducting Monte Carlo simulations, we then verify the reliability and security performances of the proposed scheme in terms of the connection outage probability (COP) and secrecy outage probability (SOP), respectively. The simulation results show that two-hop wireless relay network can achieve reliable and secure communications by using our proposed scheme. We also performed comparison experiments between our proposed scheme and two benchmark schemes. The comparison results indicate that our proposed scheme outperforms the max-ratio scheme in terms of the SOP.

Keywords: Markov decision process; buffer-aided relay selection; connection outage probability; deep Q-learning; physical-layer security; secrecy outage probability.

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62001273, 62002210), the Open Project Program of the Shaanxi Key Laboratory for Network Computing and Security Technology (NCST2021YB-02), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (GK202103087) and the Scientific Research Plan of Shaanxi Provincial Department of Education (19JK0176).