Secure Beamforming Design in Relay-Assisted Internet of Things

A secure downlink transmission system which is exposed to multiple eavesdroppers and is appropriate for Internet of Things (IoT) applications is considered. A worst case scenario is assumed, in the sense that, in order to enhance their interception ability all eavesdroppers are located close to each other, near the controller and collude to form joint receive beamforming. For such a system, a novel cooperative nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) secure transmission scheme for which an IoT device with a stronger channel condition acts as an energy harvesting relay in order to assist a second IoT device operating under weaker channel conditions, is proposed and its performance is analyzed and evaluated. A secrecy sum rate (SSR) maximization problem is formulated and solved under three constraints: 1) transmit power; 2) successive interference cancellation; and 3) quality of service. By considering both passive and active eavesdroppers scenarios, two optimization schemes are proposed to improve the overall system SSR. On the one hand, for the passive eavesdropper scenario, an artificial noise-aided secure beamforming scheme is proposed. Since this optimization problem is nonconvex, instead of using traditional but highly complex, brute-force 2-D search, it is conveniently transformed into a convex one by using an epigraph reformulation. On the other hand, for the active multiantennas eavesdroppers’ scenario, the orthogonal-projection-based beamforming scheme is considered, and by employing the successive convex approximation method, a suboptimal solution is proposed. Furthermore, since for single antenna transmission the orthogonal-projection-based scheme may not be applicable a simple power control scheme is proposed. Various performance evaluation results obtained by means of computer simulations have verified that the proposed schemes outperform other benchmark schemes in terms of SSR performance.