A lightweight security framework for network coding enabled mobile small cells

Future wireless networks are expected to serve a dense network of mobile devices with high quality of service using the available bandwidth efficiently. Towards this end, the concept of small cells and cooperative networks are extensively studied in the 5G and beyond era of wireless communication. Network coding can be used to achieve high performance throughput as well as energy saving in wireless networks. However, efficient integrity schemes are necessary for a network coding environment to counter security challenges like pollution attacks and thus to exploit the benefits of network coding. In a network coding enabled mobile small cells, the security schemes can be optimised depending on the security conditions of the small cell deployment. Existing integrity schemes can be modified and optimised to reduce the latency and computational overheads using these conditions. This paper proposes a lightweight security framework for network coding enabled mobile small cells where the integrity check is limited to specific nodes considering the trustiness of the nodes in a small cell.