Joint optimization of QoS and security for differentiated applications in heterogeneous networks

The recent proliferation of various new real-time and latency-sensitive applications and differentiated services, surge of mobile traffic, and emergence of next generation Het-Nets are anticipated to exponentially increase the number of potentially "untrusted" links to the operator's core network. Therefore, mobile broadband operators need to provide much needed security without sacrificing the network performance which calls for the joint provisioning of QoS and security technologies. However, research studies on HetNets have often treated QoS and security as separate entities, and overlooked the combined QoS and security optimization because they usually have difficult-to-model trade-off. In this article, we formulate this problem and propose a game-theoretic algorithm to solve it. In our proposal, the mobile users and their servicing base stations play games with each other to ensure a balanced set of security and QoS parameters for the users. The effectiveness of our proposal is evaluated through simulations.