Secure and Energy-Efficient Transmissions in Cache-Enabled Heterogeneous Cellular Networks: Performance Analysis and Optimization

Abstract: This paper studies physical-layer security for a cache-enabled heterogeneous cellular network comprised of a macro base station and multiple small base stations (SBSs). We investigate a joint design on caching placement and file delivery for realizing secure and energy-efficient transmissions against randomly distributed eavesdroppers. We propose a novel hybrid "most popular content" and "largest content diversity" caching placement policy to distribute files of different popularities. Depending on the availability and placement of the requested file, we employ three cooperative transmission schemes, namely, distributed beamforming, frequency-domain orthogonal transmission, and best SBS relaying, respectively. We derive analytical expressions for the connection outage probability and secrecy outage probability for each transmission scheme. Afterwards, we design the optimal transmission rates and caching allocation successively to achieve a maximal overall secrecy throughput and secrecy energy efficiency, respectively. Numerical results verify the theoretical analyses and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed hybrid caching policy.