Improving secrecy rate via spectrum leasing for friendly jamming

Cooperative jamming paradigm in secure communications enlists network nodes to transmit noise or structured codewords, in order to impair the eavesdropper's ability to decode messages to be kept confidential from it. Such an approach can significantly help in facilitating secure communication between legitimate parties but, by definition, assumes dedicated and/or altruistic nodes willing to act as cooperative jammers. In this paper, it is demonstrated that cooperative jamming leads to meaningful secrecy rate improvements even when this assumption is removed. A distributed mechanism is developed that motivates jamming participation of otherwise non-cooperative terminals, by compensating them with an opportunity to use the fraction of legitimate parties' spectrum for their own data traffic. With the goal of maximizing their data transmission rate priced by the invested power, cooperative jammers provide the jamming/transmitting power that is generally proportional to the amount of leased bandwidth. The fully decentralized framework is facilitated through a game-theoretic model, with the legitimate parties as the spectrum owners acting as the game leader, and the set of assisting jammers constituting the follower. To facilitate the behavior of non-cooperative and competitive multiple jammers, auctioning and power control mechanisms are applied for a follower sub-game in a two-layer leader-follower game framework.