Hybrid Opportunistic Relaying and Jamming With Power Allocation for Secure Cooperative Networks

This paper studies the cooperative transmission for securing a decode-and-forward (DF) two-hop network where multiple cooperative nodes coexist with a potential eavesdropper. Under the more practical assumption that only the channel distribution information (CDI) of the eavesdropper is known, we propose an opportunistic relaying with artificial jamming secrecy scheme, where a “best” cooperative node is chosen among a collection of N possible candidates to forward the confidential signal and the others send jamming signals to confuse the eavesdroppers. We first investigate the ergodic secrecy rate (ESR) maximization problem by optimizing the power allocation between the confidential signal and jamming signals. In particular, we exploit the limiting distribution technique of extreme order statistics to build an asymptotic closed-form expression of the achievable ESR and the power allocation is optimized to maximize the ESR lower bound. Although the optimization problems are non-convex, we propose a sequential parametric convex approximation (SPCA) algorithm to locate the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) solutions. Furthermore, taking the time variance of the legitimate links' CSIs into consideration, we address the impacts of the outdated CSIs to the proposed secrecy scheme, and derive an asymptotic ESR. Finally, we generalize the analysis to the scenario with multiple eavesdroppers, and give the asymptotic analytical results of the achievable ESR. Simulation results confirm our analytical results.