Secure Beamforming via Amplify-and-Forward Relays in Machine-to-Machine Communications

We consider the collaborative use of amplify-and-forward relays to form a beamforming system and provide physical layer security for a wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) communication network. We investigate two objectives: (i) the achievable secrecy rate maximization subject to the relay power constraint and (ii) the relay transmit power minimization under a secrecy rate constraint. For the first objective, we propose a secrecy rate maximization (SRM) beamforming scheme. The secrecy rate maximization problem can be formed into a two-level optimization problem and we solve it using semidefinite relaxation (SDR) techniques. To reduce the complexity of the SRM beamforming scheme, a virtual eavesdropper-based SRM (VE-SRM) beamforming scheme is proposed, in which we hypothesize a virtual eavesdropper instead of all eavesdroppers and maximize the secrecy rate according to the virtual eavesdropper. In addition, for the second objective, we design a relay power minimization (RPM) beamforming scheme, in which an iterative algorithm combining the SDR technology and the gradient-based method is devised by studying the convexity of the RPM problem. By relaxing the constraints of the RPM beamforming scheme, we propose a virtual eavesdropper-based RPM (VERPM) beamforming scheme, which reduces the multivariate RPM problem to a problem of a single variable, and thus an analytical solution is obtained. Our proposed beamforming designs can work well even if the number of eavesdroppers is larger than that of relays, while the existing schemes, for example, the null-space beamforming schemes, cannot work under this condition. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the significance of performance improvements with the SRM and RPM beamforming schemes. It is also shown that the virtual eavesdropper approaches significantly reduce the complexity with acceptable performance degradation.