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IEEE/CIC International Conference on Communications in China (ICCC)

Using simple relays to improve physical-layer security

Gan Zheng, Jiangyuan Li, Kai‐Kit Wong, Athina P. Petropulu, Björn Ottersten

Published Aug 1, 2012• 13 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This paper studies different uses of two cooperating relays to improve the secrecy rate of a wiretap channel. These two relays are assumed to perform only simple functions: either amplify-and-forward (AF) or jamming. Complex functions such as decode-and-forward (DF) are not considered. We study three modes of cooperation: i) cooperative jamming (CJ), ii) AF-aided beamforming and iii) mixed AF-aided beamforming and CJ, all with individual relay power constraints. While i) is known in the literature, our efforts are spent on ii) and iii). In particular, for iii), we assume that the jamming signals in two communication stages are correlated, giving rise to improved performances. We also propose a heuristic approach for selecting the appropriate cooperating mode. Simulation results illustrate the performance gain of each scheme under different channel conditions and the effectiveness of the proposed mode selection method.

DOI
10.1109/iccchina.2012.6356902

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This paper studies different uses of two cooperating relays to improve the secrecy rate of a wiretap channel. These two relays are assumed to perform only simple functions: either amplify-and-forward (AF) or jamming. Complex functions such as decode-and-forward (DF) are not considered. We study three modes of cooperation: i) cooperative jamming (CJ), ii) AF-aided beamforming and iii) mixed AF-aided beamforming and CJ, all with individual relay power constraints. While i) is known in the literature, our efforts are spent on ii) and iii). In particular, for iii), we assume that the jamming signals in two communication stages are correlated, giving rise to improved performances. We also propose a heuristic approach for selecting the appropriate cooperating mode. Simulation results illustrate the performance gain of each scheme under different channel conditions and the effectiveness of the proposed mode selection method.
Physical (PHY) layer security approaches for wireless communications can prevent eavesdropping without upper layer data encryption. However, they are hampered by wireless channel conditions: absent feedback, they are typically feasible only when the source-destination channel is better than the source-eavesdropper channel. Node cooperation is a means to overcome this challenge and improve the performance of secure wireless communications. This paper addresses secure communications of one source-destination pair with the help of multiple cooperating relays in the presence of one or more eavesdroppers. Three cooperative schemes are considered: decode-and-forward (DF), amplify-and-forward (AF), and cooperative jamming (CJ). For these schemes, the relays transmit a weighted version of a reencoded noise-free message signal (for DF), a received noisy source signal (for AF), or a common jamming signal (for CJ). Novel system designs are proposed, consisting of the determination of relay weights and the allocation of transmit power, that maximize the achievable secrecy rate subject to a transmit power constraint, or, minimize the transmit power subject to a secrecy rate constraint. For DF in the presence of one eavesdropper, closed-form optimal solutions are derived for the relay weights. For other problems, since the optimal relay weights are difficult to obtain, several criteria are considered leading to suboptimal but simple solutions, i.e., the complete nulling of the message signals at all eavesdroppers (for DF and AF), or the complete nulling of jamming signal at the destination (for CJ). Based on the designed relay weights, for DF in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers, and for CJ in the presence of one eavesdropper, the optimal power allocation is obtained in closed-form; in all other cases the optimal power allocation is obtained via iterative algorithms. Numerical evaluation of the obtained secrecy rate and transmit power results show that the proposed design can significantly improve the performance of secure wireless communications.
This paper proposes a new joint cooperative beamforming and jamming (JCBJ) scheme for improving the physical layer security of decode-and-forward wireless networks where a source node transmits to its destination with the aid of multiple intermediate nodes in the presence of an eavesdropper. In the proposed JCBJ scheme, we select the intermediate nodes succeeding in source decoding as the relays to forward the source transmission simultaneously by employing a beamforming weight vector, and meanwhile, use the remaining ones as the friendly jammers to disturb the eavesdropper by sending artificial noise. In order to achieve the secrecy rate maximum, we further study on the power allocation among the source, relays, and jammers under two assumptions of the wiretap link's channel state information. We derive the closed-form optimal solutions by first allocating the transmit power at the source within different ranges to consider all the possible relay selection schemes in which different numbers of relays are employed, and then transforming the multivariable power allocation problem to a set of single-variable optimization subproblems. Our numerical results show the superiority of the proposed JCBJ scheme and the proposed power allocation strategies.
In this work, physical layer secure transmission of a cooperative wireless communication system over a three-phase amplify-and-forward (AF) two-way relaying channels is studied. A cooperative jamming and multi-antenna relay beamforming scheme that improves physical layer security of the system is proposed. Specifically, it is suggested that in the first and second timeslots when the legitimate users transmit alternatively, a jamming signal can be transmitted by the legitimate party that is not transmitting information-bearing signals This scheme, compared with the approach using a dedicated jammer, achieves a similar jamming effect with reduced complexity. In the third time slot of the protocol, the relay uses two beamforming matrices to process the bidirectional information signals. The jamming signal components at the relay are projected onto the null space of the legitimate relay-destination channels such that they do not affect legitimate communications. Through joint optimization, the sum throughput of the legitimate communication is maximized. In the numerical examples, the proposed scheme is shown to improve the system's secrecy transmission performance.
In this letter, we propose a novel scheme to improve physical layer security for amplify-and-forward (AF) relay networks with two-hop information leakage. Unlike traditional joint cooperative beamforming (CB) and cooperative jamming (CJ) design, where mere artificial noise (AN) is exploited by the jammers to degrade eavesdroppers' channels, in our proposed scheme, the jammers send AN along with the confidential signal to simultaneously confuse the eavesdroppers and enhance the quality of received signals at the destination. In particular, the CB vectors and AN covariance matrix are jointly optimized for the relays and jammers under individual power constraints. By decoupling this resultant design problem, suboptimal solutions are obtained using the semidefinite relaxation technique. Simulation results are also provided to demonstrate that the proposed scheme has an obvious advantage in enhancing the secrecy rate.
The idea of multiuser (nodes) cooperation is an efficient way to improve the physical-layer security of a wireless transmission in the presence of passive eavesdroppers. However, due to the half-duplex constraint of the practical transceivers, two phases are required for one round of data transmission, which grants the eavesdroppers two opportunities to wiretap the information. Therefore, protecting the data transmissions in both phases is critical. Toward this end, we propose a joint cooperative beamforming, jamming, and power-allocation scheme to enhance the security of an amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative relay network in this paper. Different from the existing works assuming that the source node always uses its total power, we show that the secrecy rate is a quasi-concave function of the power of the source node so that allocating its total power may not be optimal. The beamformer design and power optimization problem can be solved by a bisection method together with a generalized eigenvalue decomposition, which has a semiclosed form and is computationally very convenient. Simulations show that the joint scheme greatly improves the security.
This paper studies the design of cooperative beamforming (CB) and cooperative jamming (CJ) for the physical layer security of an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay network in the presence of multiple multi-antenna eavesdroppers. The secrecy rate maximization (SRM) problem of such a network is to maximize the difference of two concave functions, a problem which is non-convex and has no efficient solution. Based on the inner convex approximation (ICA) and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) techniques, we propose two novel low-complexity schemes to design CB and CJ for SRM in the AF network. In the first strategy, relay nodes adopt the CB only to secure transmission. Based on ICA, this design guarantees convergence to a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) solution of the SDR of the original problem. In the second strategy, the optimal joint CB and CJ design is studied and the proposed joint design can guarantee convergence to a KKT solution of the original problem. Moreover, in the second strategy, we prove that SDR always has a rank-1 solution for the SRM problem. Simulation results show the superiority of the proposed schemes.