Cooperative jamming via spectrum leasing

Secure communication rates can be facilitated or enhanced via deployment of cooperative jammers in a multi-terminal environment. Such an approach typically assumes dedicated and/or altruistic jamming nodes, investing their resources for the good of the whole system. In this paper, we demonstrate that jammers can be recruited to provide significant improvements of secrecy rates even when this assumption is alleviated. A game-theoretic framework is proposed where a source node, towards the maximization of its secrecy rate, utilizes the jamming services from a set of non-altruistic nodes, compensating them with a fraction of its bandwidth for transmission of their user data. With the goal of maximizing their user-data transmission rate priced by the invested power, potential cooperative jammers will provide the jamming/transmitting power that is generally proportional to the amount of leased bandwidth. Elaborating initially on a single-jammer scenario, interaction between the source and a cooperative jammer is modeled as the Stackelberg leader-follower game. The scheme is further extended to involve multiple potential jammers, applying competition mechanisms such as the auctioning and power control game, while maintaining the Stackelberg framework.