Can a multi-hop link relying on untrusted amplify-and-forward relays render security?

Cooperative relaying is utilized as an efficient method for data communication in wireless sensor networks and the Internet of Things. However, sometimes due to the necessity of multi-hop relaying in such communication networks, it is challenging to guarantee the secrecy of cooperative transmissions when the relays may themselves be eavesdroppers, i.e., we may face with the untrusted relaying scenario where the relays are both necessary helpers and potential adversary. To obviate this issue, a new cooperative jamming scheme is proposed in this paper, in which the data can be confidentially communicated from the source to the destination through multiple untrusted relays. In our proposed secure transmission scheme, all the legitimate nodes contribute to providing secure communication by intelligently injecting artificial noises to the network in different communication phases. For the sake of analysis, we consider a multi-hop untrusted relaying network with two successive intermediate nodes, i.e, a three-hop communications network. Given this system model, a new closed-form expression is presented in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime for the Ergodic secrecy rate (ESR). Furthermore, we evaluate the high-SNR slope and power offset of the ESR to gain an insightful comparison of the proposed secure transmission scheme and the state-of-arts. Our numerical results highlight that the proposed secure transmission scheme provides better secrecy rate performance compared with the two-hop untrusted relaying as well as the direct transmission schemes.