Proactive eavesdropping with jamming and eavesdropping mode selection

In this paper, we study a legitimate proactive eavesdropping scenario where a central monitor covertly wiretaps the communications between a pair of suspicious users via multiple intermediate nodes. For this system, it is necessary to ensure the eavesdropping channel capacity higher than the data rate of the suspicious users so that the central monitor can reliably decode the intercepted information. To this end, the intermediate nodes operate in either eavesdropping or jamming modes. The eavesdropping nodes forward the intercepted data from the suspicious users to the central monitor, while the jamming nodes transmit jamming signals to control the data rate of the suspicious users if necessary. We optimize the mode selection and transmit power of each intermediate node to achieve the maximum eavesdropping rate. Two different scenarios are investigated, in which the intermediate nodes communicate with the central monitor through wired links or wireless channels. For both configurations, globally optimal solutions are developed for joint mode selection and transmit power optimization problems. We also propose low-complexity methods which achieve near-optimal performance with reduced computational complexity. The numerical results validate the efficiency of our proposed algorithms.