Relay Selection for Wireless Communications Against Eavesdropping: A Security-Reliability Tradeoff Perspective

This article examines the secrecy coding aided wireless communications from a source to a destination in the presence of an eavesdropper from a security-reliability tradeoff (SRT) perspective. Explicitly, the security is quantified in terms of the intercept probability experienced at the eavesdropper, while the outage probability encountered at the destination is used to measure the transmission reliability. We characterize the SRT of conventional direct transmission from the source to the destination and show that if the outage probability is increased, the intercept probability decreases, and vice versa. We first demonstrate that the employment of relay nodes for assisting the source-destination transmissions is capable of defending against eavesdropping, followed by quantifying the benefits of single-relay selection (SRS) as well as of multi-relay selection (MRS) schemes. More specifically, in the SRS scheme, only the single "best" relay is selected for forwarding the source signal to the destination, whereas the MRS scheme allows multiple relays to participate in this process. It is illustrated that both the SRS and MRS schemes achieve a better SRT than the conventional direct transmission, especially upon increasing the number of relays. Numerical results also show that as expected, the MRS outperforms the SRS in terms of its SRT. Additionally, we present some open challenges and future directions for the wireless relay aided physical-layer security.Comment: 16 pages, IEEE Network, 201

Cooperative diversity for the cellular uplink: Sharing strategies, performance analysis, and receiver design

In this thesis, we propose data sharing schemes for the cooperative diversity in a cellular uplink to exploit diversity and enhance throughput performance of the system. Particularly, we consider new two and three-or-more user decode and forward (DF) protocols using space time block codes. We discuss two-user and three-user amplify and forward (AF) protocols and evaluate the performance of the above mentioned data sharing protocols in terms of the bit error rate and the throughput in an asynchronous code division multiple access (CDMA) cellular uplink. We develop a linear receiver for joint space-time decoding and multiuser detection that provides full diversity and near maximum-likelihood performance.;We also focus on a practical situation where inter-user channel is noisy and cooperating users can not successfully estimate other user\u27s data. We further design our system model such that, users decide not to forward anything in case of symbol errors. Channel estimation plays an important role here, since cooperating users make random estimation errors and the base station can not have the knowledge of the errors or the inter-user channels. We consider a training-based approach for channel estimation. We provide an information outage probability analysis for the proposed multi-user sharing schemes. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Wireless transmission protocols using relays for broadcast and information exchange channels

Relays have been used to overcome existing network performance bottlenecks in meeting the growing demand for large bandwidth and high quality of service (QoS) in wireless networks. This thesis proposes several wireless transmission protocols using relays in practical multi-user broadcast and information exchange channels. The main theme is to demonstrate that efficient use of relays provides an additional dimension to improve reliability, throughput, power efficiency and secrecy. First, a spectrally efficient cooperative transmission protocol is proposed for the multiple-input and singleoutput (MISO) broadcast channel to improve the reliability of wireless transmission. The proposed protocol mitigates co-channel interference and provides another dimension to improve the diversity gain. Analytical and simulation results show that outage probability and the diversity and multiplexing tradeoff of the proposed cooperative protocol outperforms the non-cooperative scheme. Second, a two-way relaying protocol is proposed for the multi-pair, two-way relaying channel to improve the throughput and reliability. The proposed protocol enables both the users and the relay to participate in interference cancellation. Several beamforming schemes are proposed for the multi-antenna relay. Analytical and simulation results reveal that the proposed protocol delivers significant improvements in ergodic capacity, outage probability and the diversity and multiplexing tradeoff if compared to existing schemes. Third, a joint beamforming and power management scheme is proposed for multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) two-way relaying channel to improve the sum-rate. Network power allocation and power control optimisation problems are formulated and solved using convex optimisation techniques. Simulation results verify that the proposed scheme delivers better sum-rate or consumes lower power when compared to existing schemes. Fourth, two-way secrecy schemes which combine one-time pad and wiretap coding are proposed for the scalar broadcast channel to improve secrecy rate. The proposed schemes utilise the channel reciprocity and employ relays to forward secret messages. Analytical and simulation results reveal that the proposed schemes are able to achieve positive secrecy rates even when the number of users is large. All of these new wireless transmission protocols help to realise better throughput, reliability, power efficiency and secrecy for wireless broadcast and information exchange channels through the efficient use of relays

Two-path succesive relaying schemes in the presence of inter-relay interference

Relaying is a promising technique to improve wireless network performance. A conventional relay transmits and receives signals in two orthogonal channels due to half duplex constraint of wireless network. This results in inefficient use of spectral resources. Two-Path Successive Relaying (TPSR) has been proposed to recover loss in spectral efficiency. However, the performance of TPSR is degraded by Inter-Relay Interference (IRI). This thesis investigates the performance of TPSR affected by IRI and proposes several schemes to improve relaying reliability, throughput and secrecy. Simulations revealed that the existing TPSR could perform worse than the conventional Half Duplex Relaying (HDR) scheme. Opportunistic TPSR schemes are proposed to improve the capacity performance. Several relay pair selection criteria are developed to ensure the selection of the best performing relay pair. Adaptive schemes which dynamically switch between TPSR and conventional HDR are proposed to further improve the performance. Simulation and analytical results show that the proposed schemes can achieve up to 45% ergodic capacity improvement and lower outage probability compared to baseline schemes, while achieving the maximum diversity and multiplexing tradeoff of the multi-input single-output channel. In addition, this thesis proposes secrecy TPSR schemes to protect secrecy of wireless transmission from eavesdropper. The use of two relays in the proposed schemes deliver more robust secrecy transmission while the use of scheduled jamming signals improves secrecy rate. Simulation and analytical results reveal that the proposed schemes can achieve up to 62% ergodic secrecy capacity improvement and quadratically lower intercept and secrecy outage probabilities if compared to existing schemes. Overall, this thesis demonstrates that the proposed TPSR schemes are able to deliver performance improvement in terms of throughput, reliability and secrecy in the presence of IRI