DC programming and DCA for enhancing physical layer security via cooperative jamming

The explosive development of computational tools these days is threatening security of cryptographic algorithms, which are regarded as primary traditional methods for ensuring information security. The physical layer security approach is introduced as a method for both improving confidentiality of the secret key distribution in cryptography and enabling the data transmission without relaying on higher-layer encryption. In this paper, the cooperative jamming paradigm - one of the techniques used in the physical layer is studied and the resulting power allocation problem with the aim of maximizing the sum of secrecy rates subject to power constraints is formulated as a nonconvex optimization problem. The objective function is a so-called DC (Difference of Convex functions) function, and some constraints are coupling. We propose a new DC formulation and develop an efficient DCA (DC Algorithm) to deal with this nonconvex program. The DCA introduces the elegant concept of approximating the original nonconvex program by a sequence of convex ones: at each iteration of DCA requires solution of a convex subproblem. The main advantage of the proposed approach is that it leads to strongly convex quadratic subproblems with separate variables in the objective function, which can be tackled by both distributed and centralized methods. One of the major contributions of the paper is to develop a highly efficient distributed algorithm to solve the convex subproblem. We adopt the dual decomposition method that results in computing iteratively the projection of points onto a very simple structural set which can be determined by an inexpensive procedure. The numerical results show the efficiency and the superiority of the new DCA based algorithm compared with existing approaches.