User and relay selection with artificial noise to enhance physical layer security

In this paper, we first propose a joint user and relay selection (JURS) scheme to enhance physical layer security in a multi-user multi-relay network, where the best pair of the user and relay that maximizes the user-to-destination signal-to-interference-to-noise ratio (SINR) is jointly selected. We analytically examine the secrecy outage probability (SOP) of this scheme, based on which the optimal power allocation between the useful signal and artificial noise at the users is determined in order to minimize the corresponding SOP. To avoid the high complexity of the joint selection, we also propose a separate user and relay selection (SURS) scheme, where one relay is firstly selected to maximize the relay-to-destination SINR and a user is then selected to maximize the SINR from the user to the selected relay. We also derive the SOP of the SURS scheme and determine the corresponding optimal power allocation. As expected, the JURS scheme can outperform the SURS scheme. However, our examination also indicates that the low-complex SURS scheme can achieve similar secrecy performance as the high-complex JURS scheme under some specific conditions, e.g., when the number of users is much larger than that of the relays or when the average signal-to-noise ratio of user-to-relay channel is much higher than that of the relay-to-destination channel.