Secure Wireless Multicast for Delay-Sensitive Prioritized Data Using Network Coding

Secure data multicast in wireless networks is challenging due to cyber-attacked vulnerabilities and high data loss of the wireless channels. Additionally, the receivers may have different characteristics (e.g., different memories, processing capabilities, etc.), thus, to be efficient, it is desirable to transmit a commensurate data to each receiver, depending on its need. The current approaches that divide the source information into packets for transmission result in a single transmission rate to all receivers. Such transmission methods not only overwhelm the receivers with less resources but also are unable to fully utilize the capabilities of receivers with higher performance. In this paper, we propose a network coding based encryption scheme for secure data transmission. The proposed scheme can achieve the same level of security with much less computational complexity at both transmitter and receivers. To achieve the maximum network transmission throughput, we then propose an optimal data transmission scheduling for delay-sensitive prioritized data. The transmissions are adaptively scheduled for each time slot based on the data importance and state of the network. The system performance is verified through both theoretical analysis and simulations. The results show that transmitted data is secure with much less computational complexity. In addition, high effective network throughput is obtained by using the proposed scheduling scheme.