Joint cooperative relaying and jamming for maximum secrecy capacity in wireless networks

This paper proposes a joint cooperative relaying and jamming scheme based on distributed beamforming to enhance the secrecy rate of a wireless channel in the presence of an eavesdropper. Specifically, we consider the scenario that a source node transmits messages to a destination with the help of multiple cooperative relays, where a relay might be compromised to become an eavesdropper as an inside attacker. Our joint relaying and jamming approach is to assign some relay nodes to act as jammers to interfere the eavesdropper, while the remaining ones continue relaying information to the destination. We propose a protocol to implement the joint cooperative relaying and jamming. Our protocol further considers the particular challenge brought by the inside attacker: it may know the jamming signal and can use it to remove the interference from the jammers. The issue of phase and frequency synchronization in the distributed beamforming is also taken into account. A mixed integer programming problem is formulated to maximize the secrecy rate with the proposed joint relaying and jamming, by which the optimal role assignment to a relay and the associated optimal power assignment can be solved. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed joint relaying and jamming in improving the secrecy rate, with comparison to existing approaches.