Timely Updating on Ber/Geo/1/2 Queue Modeled Status Updating System with Eavesdropper

Area of Science:

• Information Theory
• Communication Systems Engineering
• Network Security

Background:

• Status updating systems are vulnerable to eavesdropping, compromising information security.
• Balancing information freshness (Age of Information - AoI) and transmission security is a key challenge.
• Existing models often do not account for the trade-offs introduced by eavesdropping and mitigation strategies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the trade-offs between information freshness (AoI) and transmission security in an eavesdropped system.
• To introduce and analyze a probabilistic deletion/retaining scheme to control insecure packet proportion.
• To derive and analyze the average δ-secure AoI and its relationship with the insecure packet proportion η(δ).

Main Methods:

• Modeling the system as a discrete-time Ber/Geo/1/2 queue with eavesdropping probability γE.
• Defining AoI and insecure packets, and introducing a probabilistic deletion/retaining scheme with parameter δ.
• Deriving formulas for average δ-secure AoI and analyzing its relationship with the insecure packet proportion η(δ).

Main Results:

• Formulas for average δ-secure AoI and its relation to η(δ) were derived.
• Analysis of special cases: γE=0 (no eavesdropping), γE=1 (guaranteed eavesdropping), and δ=1 (maximum deletion).
• Numerical simulations demonstrated that average δ-secure AoI and η(δ) can often be minimized simultaneously, with trends varying based on γE.

Conclusions:

• The proposed probabilistic deletion/retaining scheme effectively manages the trade-off between AoI and transmission security.
• Simultaneous minimization of average δ-secure AoI and insecure packet proportion is achievable in most scenarios.
• The findings provide valuable insights for designing secure and timely status updating systems.