Energy Efficiency of Cooperative Jamming Strategies in Secure Wireless Networks

Energy efficient secure communication in wireless networks in the presence of eavesdroppers is considered. For a secure transmission to the destination, a set of intermediate "jammer" nodes are chosen to generate artificial noise that confuses the eavesdropper. We consider two jamming strategies: beamforming and cooperative diversity. Previous research has focused largely on cooperative beamforming strategies, but we demonstrate a number of scenarios where a cooperative diversity strategy is desirable. This motivates approaches which selectively switch between the two strategies, from which significant energy savings can often be realized. In our simulations, energy savings of up to 60% are observed in the simulated networks.