Physical layer security of vehicular networks with cooperative jamming helpers

Abstract

As an important part of the intelligent transportation system (ITS), vehicular networks can provide drivers and passengers with more comfortable and convenient services such as efficient traffic management and infotainment. However, the security threats on data exchanges over vehicular networks have become increasingly severe. Different from conventional cryptographic technologies, the application of physical layer security (PLS) to vehicular networks has been investigated to prevent the security of exchanging data from the eavesdropper and measure precisely the leaked information to the eavesdropper, due to its low complexity and communication overhead. In this work, we are concerned with the PLS of cooperative vehicular networks consisting of a source vehicle, a destination vehicle, an eavesdropping vehicle and a cooperative jamming vehicle. First, to improve the secrecy performance, the cooperative jamming helper emits jamming signals to degrade the eavesdropping channel without harming the legitimate channel. Then, based on the Rayleigh fading channel models and the traffic models, the closed-form expressions of the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and the average secrecy capacity (ASC) of the considered vehicular networks are derived, which deliver more implications of various system parameters on SOP and ASC performances and can be computed without simulations at a lower complexity. Second, a definition of the optimal jamming vehicle is introduced and then the cooperative jamming vehicle selection strategy is presented. The existence of the optimal jamming vehicle is measured in probability, which is explored analytically. Third, the optimal power allocation that maximizes the secrecy capacity is found analytically for the source vehicle and the cooperative jamming helper. Finally, simulations are also presented to demonstrate the validation of these analytical results and confirm the advantages of the cooperative jamming strategy and the optimal power allocation. From the numerical results, more observations on the effects of the main system parameters on secrecy performances are obtained, which provides some useful guides for practice.