Coalitional Games for Distributed Eavesdroppers Cooperation in Wireless Networks
Abstract
Physical layer security aspects of wireless networks have re- cently attracted an increased attention due to the emergence of large-scale decentralized networks. While most existing literature focuses on link-level performance analysis from the perspective of the wireless users, this paper turns the atten- tion to the eavesdroppers' (attacker) side of the problem. In this context, we introduce a model that enables a num- ber of single antenna eavesdroppers in a wireless network to cooperate, by performing distributed receive beamform- ing, for improving the damage that they inflict on the net- work's wireless users when tapping through their transmis- sions. We model the eavesdroppers cooperation problem as a non-transferable coalitional game and we propose a dis- tributed algorithm for coalition formation. The proposed algorithm allows the eavesdroppers to take autonomous deci- sions to cooperate and form coalitions, while maximizing the damage that they cause on the wireless users. This damage is quantified in terms of the overall secrecy capacity reduc- tion that the eavesdroppers incur on the users while taking into account cooperation costs in terms of the time required for information exchange. We analyze the resulting coali- tional structures, discuss their properties, and study how the eavesdroppers can adapt the topology to environmental changes such as mobility. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm allows the eavesdroppers to cooperate and self-organize while achieving an improvement of the av- erage payoff per eavesdropper up to 27.6% per eavesdropping cycle relative to the non-cooperative case.
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