Optimal Cooperative Relaying Schemes for Improving Wireless Physical Layer Security

TL;DR

This paper investigates cooperative relaying schemes in wireless networks to enhance physical layer security against eavesdroppers, proposing optimal strategies for weighted retransmission and jamming, with algorithms and numerical validation.

Contribution

It introduces optimal cooperative relaying schemes with closed-form solutions and algorithms for secure communication, addressing multiple eavesdroppers and power constraints.

Findings

Cooperative relaying improves security over direct transmission.

Optimal weights for decode-and-forward scheme derived in closed form.

Algorithms guarantee convergence to optimal solutions for jamming and multiple eavesdroppers.

Abstract

We consider a cooperative wireless network in the presence of one of more eavesdroppers, and exploit node cooperation for achieving physical (PHY) layer based security. Two different cooperation schemes are considered. In the first scheme, cooperating nodes retransmit a weighted version of the source signal in a decode-and-forward (DF) fashion. In the second scheme, while the source is transmitting, cooperating nodes transmit weighted noise to confound the eavesdropper (cooperative jamming (CJ)). We investigate two objectives, i.e., maximization of achievable secrecy rate subject to a total power constraint, and minimization of total power transmit power under a secrecy rate constraint. For the first design objective with a single eavesdropper we obtain expressions for optimal weights under the DF protocol in closed form, and give an algorithm that converges to the optimal solution for the CJ scheme; while for multiple eavesdroppers we give an algorithm for the solution using the DF protocol that is guaranteed to converge to the optimal solution for two eavesdroppers. For the second design objective, existing works introduced additional constraints in order to reduce the degree of difficulty, thus resulting in suboptimal solutions. In this work, either a closed form solution is obtained, or algorithms to search for the solution are proposed. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the proposed schemes and demonstrate the advantages of cooperation as compared to direct transmission.