Apply Artificial Noise To Secure Fading Relay Networks: A SER-Based Approach

TL;DR

This paper proposes a SER-based artificial noise design to enhance security in untrusted relay networks by degrading the relay's error performance, considering different levels of channel state information.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical SER expression and optimal AN design for both perfect and statistical CSI scenarios, highlighting the suboptimality of Gaussian noise.

Findings

Optimal AN phase and power distribution maximize relay SER

Gaussian noise is suboptimal for AN generation

Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed AN design

Abstract

We apply the concept of artificial and controlled interference in a triangular relay network with an untrusted relay aiming at enhancing the wireless communication secrecy between the source and the destination node. In order to shield the square quadrature amplitude modulated (QAM) signals transmitted from the source node to the relay, the destination node designs and transmits artificial noise (AN) symbols to jam the relay reception. The objective of our considered AN design is to degrade the error probability performance at the untrusted relay, for different types of channel state information (CSI) at the destination. By considering perfect knowledge of the instantaneous CSI of the source-to-relay and relay-to-destination links, we first present an analytical expression for the symbol error rate (SER) performance at the relay. Based on the assumption of an average power constraint at the destination node, we then derive the optimal phase and power distribution of the AN that maximizes the SER at the relay. Furthermore, we obtain the optimal AN design for the case where only statistical CSI is available at the destination node. For both cases, our study reveals that the Gaussian distribution is generally not optimal to generate AN symbols. In particular, the conducted numerical results show that the Gaussian distributed AN is far from optimal. The presented AN design takes into account practical parameters for the communication links, such as QAM signaling and maximum likelihood decoding.