Enhanced Secrecy Performance of Multihop IoT Networks With Cooperative Hybrid-Duplex Jamming

Abstract

As the number of connected devices is exponentially increasing, security in Internet of Things (IoT) networks presents a major challenge. Accordingly, in this work we investigate the secrecy performance of multihop IoT networks assuming that each node is equipped with only two antennas, and can operate in both Half-Duplex (HD) and Full-Duplex (FD) modes. Moreover, we propose an FD Cooperative Jamming (CJ) scheme to provide higher security against randomly located eavesdroppers, where each information symbol is protected with two jamming signals by its two neighbouring nodes, one of which is the FD receiver. We demonstrate that under a total power constraint, the proposed FD-CJ scheme significantly outperforms the conventional FD Single Jamming (FD-SJ) approach, where only the receiving node acts as a jammer, especially when the number of hops is larger than two. Moreover, when the Channel State Information (CSI) is available at the transmitter, and transmit beamforming is applied, our results demonstrate that at low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), higher secrecy performance is obtained if the receiving node operates in HD and allocates both antennas for data reception, leaving only a single jammer active; while at high SNR, a significant secrecy enhancement can be achieved with FD jamming. Our proposed FD-CJ scheme is found to demonstrate a great resilience over multihop networks, as only a marginal performance loss is experienced as the number of hops increases. For each case, an integral closed-form expression is derived for the secrecy outage probability, and verified by Monte Carlo simulations.