Secrecy Capacity Optimization via Cooperative Relaying and Jamming for WANETs

Abstract

Cooperative wireless networking, which is promising in improving the system operation efficiency and reliability by acquiring more accurate and timely information, has attracted considerable attentions to support many services in practice. However, the problem of secure cooperative communication has not been well investigated yet. In this paper, we exploit physical layer security to provide secure cooperative communication for wireless ad hoc networks (WANETs) where involve multiple source-destination pairs and malicious eavesdroppers. By characterizing the security performance of the system by secrecy capacity, we study the secrecy capacity optimization problem in which security enhancement is achieved via cooperative relaying and cooperative jamming. Specifically, we propose a system model where a set of relay nodes can be exploited by multiple source-destination pairs to achieve physical layer security. We theoretically present a corresponding formulation for the relay assignment problem and develop an optimal algorithm to solve it in polynomial time. To further increase the system secrecy capacity, we exploit the cooperative jamming technique and propose a smart jamming algorithm to interfere the eavesdropping channels. Through extensive experiments, we validate that our proposed algorithms significantly increase the system secrecy capacity under various network settings.