Jamming-Assisted Proactive Eavesdropping Over Two Suspicious Communication Links

Abstract

This paper studies a new and challenging wireless surveillance problem where a legitimate monitor attempts to eavesdrop two suspicious communication links simultaneously. To facilitate concurrent eavesdropping, our multi-antenna legitimate monitor employs a proactive eavesdropping via jamming approach, by selectively jamming suspicious receivers to lower the transmission rates of the target links. In particular, we are interested in characterizing the achievable eavesdropping rate region for the minimum-mean-squared-error (MMSE) receiver case, by optimizing the legitimate monitor's jamming transmit covariance matrix subject to its power budget. As the monitor cannot hear more than what suspicious links transmit, the achievable eavesdropping rate region is essentially the intersection of the achievable rate region for the two suspicious links and that for the two eavesdropping links. The former region can be purposely altered by the monitor's jamming transmit covariance matrix, whereas the latter region is fixed when the MMSE receiver is employed. Therefore, we first analytically characterize the achievable rate region for the two suspicious links via optimizing the jamming transmit covariance matrix and then obtain the achievable eavesdropping rate region for the MMSE receiver case. In addition, we also consider the MMSE with successive interference cancellation (MMSE-SIC) receiver case and characterize the corresponding achievable eavesdropping rate region by jointly optimizing the time-sharing factor between different decoding orders. Furthermore, extensions to the imperfect channel state information case and the more than two suspicious links scenario are also examined. Finally, numerical results are provided to corroborate our analysis and evaluate the eavesdropping performance.