Distributed precoding in multi-relay wiretap systems with amplify-and-forward

The security of the multi-relay wiretap system with an eavesdropper is investigated in this paper, where the amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying protocol is used. Appropriate distributed precoding design at the relay nodes can be utilized to guarantee the secure communication, which means maximizing the ratio of received signal power at the destination node and the eavesdropper node. In decode-and-forward relaying systems, an iterative algorithm has been proposed to find sub-optimum distributed precoding angles at all the relay nodes [1]. In this paper, this algorithm is extended to be used in AF systems with some modifications. In the algorithm, after receiving the equivalent channel state information (CSI) from the last relay node, the current relay node derives the optimum distributed precoding angle, and updates the equivalent CSI for the next one, so that each relay node shares much less CSI information with each other, compared with the exhaustive search scheme. Numerical and simulation results demonstrate that in the AF protocol system, the iterative algorithm can help achieve considerable secrecy capacity with a little CSI sharing overhead.