Wireless Surveillance of Two-Hop Communications

Wireless surveillance is becoming increasingly important to protect the public security by legitimately eavesdropping suspicious wireless communications. This paper studies the wireless surveillance of a two-hop suspicious communication link by a half-duplex legitimate monitor. By exploring the suspicious link's two-hop nature, the monitor can adaptively choose among the following three eavesdropping modes to improve the eavesdropping performance: (I) \emph{passive eavesdropping} to intercept both hops to decode the message collectively, (II) \emph{proactive eavesdropping} via {\emph{noise jamming}} over the first hop, and (III) \emph{proactive eavesdropping} via {\emph{hybrid jamming}} over the second hop. In both proactive eavesdropping modes, the (noise/hybrid) jamming over one hop is for the purpose of reducing the end-to-end communication rate of the suspicious link and accordingly making the interception more easily over the other hop. Under this setup, we maximize the eavesdropping rate at the monitor by jointly optimizing the eavesdropping mode selection as well as the transmit power for noise and hybrid jamming. Numerical results show that the eavesdropping mode selection significantly improves the eavesdropping rate as compared to each individual eavesdropping mode.Comment: Submitted for conference publicatio

Proactive Eavesdropping via Jamming over HARQ-Based Communications

This paper studies the wireless surveillance of a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) based suspicious communication link over Rayleigh fading channels. We propose a proactive eavesdropping approach, where a half-duplex monitor can opportunistically jam the suspicious link to exploit its potential retransmissions for overhearing more efficiently. In particular, we consider that the suspicious link uses at most two HARQ rounds for transmitting the same data packet, and we focus on two cases without and with HARQ combining at the monitor receiver. In both cases, we aim to maximize the successful eavesdropping probability at the monitor, by adaptively allocating the jamming power in the first HARQ round according to fading channel conditions, subject to an average jamming power constraint. For both cases, we show that the optimal jamming power allocation follows a threshold-based policy, and the monitor jams with constant power when the eavesdropping channel gain is less than the threshold. Numerical results show that the proposed proactive eavesdropping scheme achieves higher successful eavesdropping probability than the conventional passive eavesdropping, and HARQ combining can help further improve the eavesdropping performance.Comment: To appear in IEEE Globecom 201

Jamming-assisted Proactive Eavesdropping over Two Suspicious Communication Links

This paper studies a new and challenging wireless surveillance problem where a legitimate monitor attempts to eavesdrop two suspicious communication links simultaneously. To facilitate concurrent eavesdropping, our multi-antenna legitimate monitor employs a proactive eavesdropping via jamming approach, by selectively jamming suspicious receivers to lower the transmission rates of the target links. In particular, we are interested in characterizing the achievable eavesdropping rate region for the minimum-mean-squared-error (MMSE) receiver case, by optimizing the legitimate monitor's jamming transmit covariance matrix subject to its power budget. As the monitor cannot hear more than what suspicious links transmit, the achievable eavesdropping rate region is essentially the intersection of the achievable rate region for the two suspicious links and that for the two eavesdropping links. The former region can be purposely altered by the monitor's jamming transmit covariance matrix, whereas the latter region is fixed when the MMSE receiver is employed. Therefore, we first analytically characterize the achievable rate region for the two suspicious links via optimizing the jamming transmit covariance matrix and then obtain the achievable eavesdropping rate region for the MMSE receiver case. Furthermore, we also extend our study to the MMSE with successive interference cancellation (MMSE-SIC) receiver case and characterize the corresponding achievable eavesdropping rate region by jointly optimizing the time-sharing factor between different decoding orders. Finally, numerical results are provided to corroborate our analysis and examine the eavesdropping performance