Adaptive Secure Transmission for Physical Layer Security in Cooperative Wireless Networks

We investigate the physical layer security in cooperative wireless networks where a source (Alice) transmits a confidential message to a destination (Bob) with the help of a cooperative node (Charlie), in the presence of an eavesdropper (Eve). Cooperative transmission is explored to secure communication between Alice and Bob, while ensuring the desired quality of service (QoS) at Charlie’s receiver. We provide a transmit design for outage constrained secrecy rate maximization, taking both security and QoS constraints into account. Unlike the conventional cooperative security that adopts a fixed transmission scheme, we propose a mechanism for transmit strategy adaptation with security protection. Specifically, the proposed cooperative transmission is replaced by a cooperative jamming scheme if either security or QoS constraint is not satisfied. Numerical results confirm that our design enables dynamic transmission, and thus is flexible and environment-adaptive.