On proactive attacks for coping with cooperative attacks in relay networks

Cooperative communications in which relays assist the transmission of signals from source to destination offer extended radio coverage and improved link reliable. However, transmitting signals with the help of a relay network may also open additional avenues for eavesdropper to overhear confidential information. Further, as jammers and eavesdroppers may cooperate to attack the relay network, offering secure communications becomes a challenging problem. To cope and reduce the effect of such cooperative attacks, we propose a proactive attack scheme in which the legitimate users generate jamming signals in an attempt to counteract such hostile cooperative attacks. In order to assess the security performance of the proactive attack scheme compared to a non-protection scheme, an analytical expression of the secrecy outage probability is derived. Numerical results for different system settings are provided showing that the proactive attack scheme can indeed significantly improve the security performance of the considered relay networks.