On the Secure Energy Efficiency of TAS/MRC with Relaying and Jamming Strategies (Extended Version)

In this paper we investigate the secure energy efficiency (SEE) in a cooperative scenario where all nodes are equipped with multiple antennas. Moreover, we employ secrecy rate and power allocation at Alice and at the relay in order to maximize the SEE, subjected to a constraint in terms of a minimal required secrecy outage probability. Only the channel state information (CSI) with respect to the legitimate nodes is available. Then, we compare the Artificial-Noise (AN) scheme with CSI-Aided Decode-and-Forward (CSI-DF), which exploits the CSI to choose the best communication path (direct or cooperative). Our results show that CSI-DF outperforms AN in terms of SEE in most scenarios, except when Eve is closer to the relay or with the increase of antennas at Eve. Additionally, we also show that the maximization of SEE implies in an optimal number of antennas to be used at each node, which is due to the trade-off between secure throughput and power consumption.