Cooperative relaying can be introduced as a promising approach for data communication in the Internet of Things (IoT), where the source and the destination may be placed far away. In this paper, by taking a variety of realistic hardware imperfections (HWIs) and channels estimation errors (CEEs) into account, the secrecy performance of a three-hop cooperative network with a source, a destination and two consecutive amplify-and-forward (AF) relays is investigated. The relays are considered to be untrusted, i.e., while they are mandatory helpers for data transmission, they may overhear the received signals. We adopt the artificial noise injection scheme, to keep the source message secret from being captured by the untrusted relays. Given this system model, a novel closed-form expression is obtained in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime for the ergodic secrecy rate (ESR) performance over Nakagami-m fading. Our simulation results highlight that the secrecy performance of the system is improved when the tolerable HWIs are distributed beneficially across the transmission and reception radio-frequency (RF) front-ends of each node. Our work reveals that unlike the ideal case, the realistic scenario of non-ideal hardware with CEEs faces with the secrecy rate ceiling. Finally, under a constraint on the total energy consumption which is applicable for battery-limited IoT equipment, we maximize the achievable secrecy rate. Our results highlight the importance of the destination's jamming cooperation and the first relay's role on the secrecy performance.
Cooperative relaying can be introduced as a promising approach for data communication in the Internet of Things (IoT), where the source and the destination may be placed far away. In this paper, by taking a variety of realistic hardware imperfections (HWIs) and channels estimation errors (CEEs) into account, the secrecy performance of a three-hop cooperative network with a source, a destination and two consecutive amplify-and-forward (AF) relays is investigated. The relays are considered to be untrusted, i.e., while they are mandatory helpers for data transmission, they may overhear the received signals. We adopt the artificial noise injection scheme, to keep the source message secret from being captured by the untrusted relays. Given this system model, a novel closed-form expression is obtained in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime for the ergodic secrecy rate (ESR) performance over Nakagami-m fading. Our simulation results highlight that the secrecy performance of the system is improved when the tolerable HWIs are distributed beneficially across the transmission and reception radio-frequency (RF) front-ends of each node. Our work reveals that unlike the ideal case, the realistic scenario of non-ideal hardware with CEEs faces with the secrecy rate ceiling. Finally, under a constraint on the total energy consumption which is applicable for battery-limited IoT equipment, we maximize the achievable secrecy rate. Our results highlight the importance of the destination's jamming cooperation and the first relay's role on the secrecy performance.
By taking a variety of realistic hardware imperfections into consideration, we propose an optimal power allocation (OPA) strategy to maximize the instantaneous secrecy rate of a cooperative wireless network comprised of a source, a destination, and an untrusted amplify-and-forward relay. We assume that either the source or the destination is equipped with a large-scale multiple antennas' system, while the rest are equipped with a single antenna. To prevent the untrusted relay from intercepting the source message, the destination sends an intended jamming noise to the relay, which is referred to as destination-based cooperative jamming. Given this system model, novel closed-form expressions are presented in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime for the ergodic secrecy rate and the secrecy outage probability. We further improve the secrecy performance of the system by optimizing the associated hardware design. The results reveal that by beneficially distributing the tolerable hardware imperfections across the transmission and reception radio-frequency front ends of each node, the system's secrecy rate may be improved. The engineering insight is that equally sharing the total imperfections at the relay between the transmitter and the receiver provides the best secrecy performance. Numerical results illustrate that the proposed OPA together with the most appropriate hardware design significantly increases the secrecy rate.
In this paper, we propose a light-weight jamming-resistant scheme for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) in 5G networks to ensure high-quality communication in a two-hop cooperative network. In the considered system model, a source communicates with a destination in the presence of an untrusted relay and a powerful multi-antenna adversary jammer. The untrusted relay is an authorized necessary helper who may wiretap the confidential information. Meanwhile, the jammer is an external attacker who tries to damage both the training and transmission phases. Different from traditional frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) techniques that require a pre-determined pattern between communicating nodes, in our scheme, the source and destination enjoy the local observations of the two-hop channels. Then they exploit the measured channel as the source of common randomness to generate shared secret keys. By collecting multiple time slots into a frame, the sequence of channels observed in each frame is utilized to specify the adopted FHSS sequence in the next frame. Based on the derived FHSS sequence from the key generation phase, the source starts to transmit its message supporting by the the destination-assisted cooperative jamming (DACJ) technique which prevents the untrusted relay from discovering the secret message. For the mentioned system model, we present new closed-form expressions for characterizing the achievable secret key rate (SKR) and ergodic secrecy rate (ESR) to highlight the efficiency of our proposed scheme compared to the state-of-the-art. We next determine the optimal power allocation (OPA) between the pilot and data transmission phases that maximizes the ESR performance while escaping from jamming attack. Finally, several numerical examples and discussions are presented to gain engineering insights behind the studied communication scenario.
In this paper, we investigate the secrecy performance of a dual-hop cooperative untrusted relay network. In this network, a source node communicates with the destination node via an untrusted fixed-gain amplify-and-forward (AF) relay node. We use destination-assisted jamming so as to keep the source and destination nodes information confidential from the relay node. Under this scenario, we derive the exact secrecy outage probability (SOP) expression, tight approximate SOP expression, and asymptotic SOP expression in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime under Nakagami-m fading channels. The analysis studied in this paper can be applicable to any AF relaying systems for fixed relay gain, and two scenarios to calculate the fixed gain are compared in terms of SOP performance. Finally, the numerical and simulation studies corroborate our analytical findings.
Limited power and computational resources make the employment of complex classical encryption schemes unrealistic in resource-limited networks, e.g., the Internet of Things (IoT). To this end, physical layer security (PLS) has shown great potential in securing such resource-limited networks. To further combat the power scarcity in IoT nodes, radio frequency (RF) based energy harvesting (EH) is an attractive energy source while relaying can enhance the energy efficiency and extend the range of data transmission. Additionally, due to deploying low-cost hardware, imperfections in the RF chain of IoT transceivers are common. Against this background, in this paper, we investigate an untrusted EH relay-aided secure communication with RF impairments. Specifically, the relay simultaneously receives the desired signal from the source and the jamming from the destination in the first phase. Hence the relay is unable to extract the confidential desired signal. The resultant composite signal is then amplified by the relay in the second phase by using the energy harvested from the composite signal followed by its transmission to the destination. Since the destination is the original source of the jamming, its effect can be readily subtracted from the composite signal to recover the original desired signal of the source. Moreover, in the face of hardware impairments (HWIs) in all nodes, maintaining optimal power management both at the source and destination may impose excessive computations on an IoT node. We solve this problem by deep learning (DL) based optimal power management maximizing the secrecy rate based on the instantaneous channel coefficients. We show that our learning-based scheme can reach the accuracy of the exhaustive search method despite its considerably lower computational complexity. Moreover, we developed an optimization framework for judiciously sharing HWIs across the nodes, so that we attain the maximum secrecy rate. To derive an efficient solution, we utilize a majorization-minimization (MM)algorithm, which is a particular instance in the family of successive convex approximation (SCA) methods. The simulation results show that the proposed HWI aware design considerably improves the secrecy rate.
In this paper, we consider a dual-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) relay network, where the source, relay, and destination are each equipped with multiple antennas. The relay is untrusted if it is willing to forward the signal to the destination and, at the same time, acts as a potential eavesdropper to interpret the message from the source. Since there exists no direct link between the source and the destination, a positive secrecy rate cannot be obtained. Addressing this issue, we propose a joint destination-aided cooperative jamming and precoding at both the source and the relay scheme: joint source, relay, and destination precoding (JP). We target at maximizing the secrecy rate by jointly designing the source, relay, and destination precoding matrices and propose an alternating iterative optimization algorithm to tackle the nonconvex problem. Then, a comprehensive study on the asymptotic performance is conducted in a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. In particular, we present simple closed-form expressions for the two key performance parameters in the asymptotic secrecy rate, i.e., the high-SNR slope and the high-SNR power offset. Finally, numerical results are conducted to demonstrate the validity of the proposed secure scheme and its performance analysis.
Abstract—In this paper, the problem of secure transmission in two-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) systems with an untrusted relay is investigated. To prevent the untrusted relay from intercepting the source message and to achieve positive secrecy rate, the destination-based cooperative jamming (DBCJ) technique is used. In this method the destination sends an intended jamming signal to the relay. This jamming signal helps protecting the source message from being captured reliably at the untrusted relay, while the destination cancels itself intended jamming signal. The optimal power allocation (OPA) technique is considered for the presented system. It is observed that the objective function is a quasiconcave function at high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) regimes. Based on this OPA technique, we study the ergodic secrecy rate (ESR) and the secrecy outage probability (SOP) of the system when the source and relay are equipped with a single antenna while the destination is equipped with largescale antenna arrays (LSA). Using the achieved closed-form expressions, one can evaluate the performance of the secure system easily and fast and also, they provide significant insight for system design. Finally, simulation results indicate the accuracy of the derived expressions.