Joint Decode-and-Forward and Cooperative Jamming for Secure Wireless Communications

In a cooperative wireless network, we exploited node cooperation for achieving physical layer based security. In this paper, the case of one source-destination pair with the help of multiple cooperating nodes(relay nodes and jamming nodes) in the presence of one eavesdropper was considered to improve the performance of secure wireless communications. A novel cooperative scheme joint decode-and-forward and cooperative jamming(JDFCJ) was proposed. In this scheme, the relay nodes transmit a weighted version of the source signals and the jamming nodes just transmit a common weighted jamming signal to confound the eavesdropper. The novel system design is proposed to minimize the transmit power subject to a secrecy rate constraint. For JDFCJ, the optimal power allocation is obtained in closed-form in the condition of the complete nulling of jamming signals at the destination. The numerical evaluation of the transmit power results shows that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the performance of secure wireless communications, as compared to the DF scheme.