Cooperative jammer placement for physical layer security enhancement

Wireless networks are increasingly being employed to transfer highly sensitive information. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, security issues have been taken as a critical role in wireless communications. A promising direction toward achieving secure wireless communications is physical-layer security, which is an approach exploiting the randomness of wireless channels to ensure secrecy. Although theoretical study has shown its potential to enhance the secrecy of wireless communications, great challenges remain when transforming the theory into practice. This article investigates strategies for allowing and managing cooperative jammers for security in wireless communications. A cooperative jamming strategy is proposed to deal with eavesdroppers anywhere in the wireless network; then jammer placement algorithms targeted toward optimizing the total number of jammers are introduced.