Destination-Aided Cooperative Jamming for Dual-Hop Amplify-and-Forward MIMO Untrusted Relay Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a dual-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) relay network, where the source, relay, and destination are each equipped with multiple antennas. The relay is untrusted if it is willing to forward the signal to the destination and, at the same time, acts as a potential eavesdropper to interpret the message from the source. Since there exists no direct link between the source and the destination, a positive secrecy rate cannot be obtained. Addressing this issue, we propose a joint destination-aided cooperative jamming and precoding at both the source and the relay scheme: joint source, relay, and destination precoding (JP). We target at maximizing the secrecy rate by jointly designing the source, relay, and destination precoding matrices and propose an alternating iterative optimization algorithm to tackle the nonconvex problem. Then, a comprehensive study on the asymptotic performance is conducted in a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. In particular, we present simple closed-form expressions for the two key performance parameters in the asymptotic secrecy rate, i.e., the high-SNR slope and the high-SNR power offset. Finally, numerical results are conducted to demonstrate the validity of the proposed secure scheme and its performance analysis.