Cooperative jamming for physical layer security in hybrid satellite terrestrial relay networks

To integrate the satellite communications with the LTE/5G services, the concept of Hybrid Satellite Terrestrial Relay Networks (HSTRNs) has been proposed. In this paper, we investigate the secure transmission in a HSTRN where the eavesdropper can wiretap the transmitted messages from both the satellite and the intermediate relays. To effectively protect the message from wiretapping in these two phases, we consider cooperative jamming by the relays, where the jamming signals are optimized to maximize the secrecy rate under the total power constraint of relays. In the first phase, the Maximal Ratio Transmission (MRT) scheme is used to maximize the secrecy rate, while in the second phase, by interpolating between the sub-optimal MRT scheme and the null-space projection scheme, the optimal scheme can be obtained via an efficient one-dimensional searching method. Simulation results show that when the number of cooperative relays is small, the performance of the optimal scheme significantly outperforms that of MRT and null-space projection scheme. When the number of relays increases, the performance of the null-space projection approaches that of the optimal one.