Transmission mode selection scheme for physical layer security in multi-user multi-relay systems

We study a relay and user selection scheme to improve the secrecy performance of cooperative multi-user multiple amplify-and-forward (AF) relay network. Nevertheless, relay transmission is highly susceptible to eavesdropping since confidential information is broadcasted twice, i.e., by the source and the relay. In particular, we propose a cooperative jamming aided secure transmission through the relay path. Furthermore, with the presence of the direct path, a transmission mode selection scheme is elaborated in such a way to reduce the amount of information leaked to non-selected users in the system, who may overhear the source message as eavesdroppers. Specifically, the selected relay is only activated when it has better secrecy performance than the source. We study the impact of outdated channel state information (CSI) on the system by deriving a closed-form lower bound for the secrecy outage probability (SOP). By investigating the effect of the jamming power level and the correlation coefficients imbalance, a comparison reveals that the proposed scheme outperforms the fixed transmission modes and its signal-to-noise ratio based counterpart. It is shown that the secrecy outage probability can be decreased as the number of destinations grows unless the number of relays is small. Importantly, optimal relay location and jamming power allocation significantly enhance the secrecy performance.