Cooperative Beamformer Design for Improving Physical Layer Security in Multi-Hop Decode-and-Forward Relay Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we consider secure communications in multi-hop relaying systems, where multiple decode-and-forward (DF) relays are located at each individual hop and perform cooperative beamforming to improve physical layer security. In order to determine the cooperative relay beamformer at each hop, we propose an iterative beamformer update scheme using semidefinite relaxation and bisection techniques. Numerical results are presented to verify the secrecy rate performance of the proposed scheme.