Combined Authentication and Quality of Service in Cooperative Communication Networks

Cooperative communication is considered a promising technique to increase channel capacity and improve reliability in wireless and cellular networks. However, it also raises a number of serious security issues as malicious nodes may impersonate and affect the integrity of the communication. In this paper, we propose a prevention-based security technique for cooperative communication taking into consideration authentication protocol, based on hash chains and Merkle trees, along with physical layer parameters which relate to the channel state information. Based on this consideration, we derive the closed-form secured throughput equations for proactive relay selection in cooperative communication that provides both hop-by-hop and end-to-end authentication and integrity protection. The simulation results show that our proposed solution, which provides authentication and protects data integrity, has a higher throughput performance when compared to existing schemes that do not consider security.