Improving Physical Layer Security for Distributed Antenna Systems with a Friendly Jammer

This paper investigates the physical layer security for a distributed antenna system, where a base station (BS) equipped with multiple distributed antennas transmits signals to a legitimate user (U) through an opportunistic antenna. Meanwhile, multiple non-colluding eavesdroppers (Es) attempt to tap the information transmission between the BS and U. To enhance the physical layer security, a friendly jammer (J) is employed to create a potential interference to Es by emitting artificial noise. However, since U is not aware of the information sent by J, it can be affected by the interference. In this context, this paper proposes adaptive jamming (AJ) scheme and interference cancellation (IC) scheme to mitigate the interference’s impact on U and consequently improve secrecy performance. Specifically, the AJ scheme avoids interference from having a negative effect on the system security by setting an interference threshold, activating the jammer only when the interference to U is below the threshold value. By contrast, the IC scheme designs an advanced special signal to eliminate the interference from J to U. For comparison, we present conventional non-jammer (NJ) scheme as a benchmark. Exact and asymptotic secrecy outage probability expressions for NJ, AJ, and IC schemes are derived over Nakagami-
m
fading channels. Numerical results show that the proposed AJ and IC schemes perform better than NJ scheme in terms of secrecy outage probability. Additionally, the physical layer security of all schemes can be improved by increasing the number of distributed antennas.