An Effective Secure Transmission Scheme for AF Relay Networks with Two-Hop Information Leakage

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.