Unsuspicious User Enabled Proactive Eavesdropping in Interference Networks Using Improper Gaussian Signaling

Proactive eavesdropping is an effective approach to improve the performance of wireless information surveillance, where suspicious users are legitimately eavesdropped by authorized monitors. For the situation when no monitor is available, we propose to authorize unsuspicious users to surveil suspicious users provided that the quality-of-service (QoS) of unsuspicious users is guaranteed. This paper considers an interference network consisting of a suspicious-transmitter (STx)/suspicious-receiver (SRx) pair and an unsuspicious-transmitter (UTx)/unsuspicious-receiver (URx) pair. We assume that URx acts as a monitor to eavesdrop the suspicious communication, and UTx adopts improper Gaussian signaling (IGS) for flexibly managing the interference to SRx. The QoS of the unsuspicious communication is guaranteed by enforcing its outage performance to be higher than a desirable level. The problem of optimizing the transmit power and the IGS circularity coefficient of UTx to maximize the average eavesdropping rate is optimally solved by the Lagrange duality method. Theoretical results show that IGS is effective when the eavesdropping is successful and the unsuspicious communication is in non-outage status. Simulation results confirm that the proposed design works well even when no additional outage of the unsuspicious communication is allowed, and show that IGS can greatly outperform proper Gaussian signaling in most cases.

Automated summary

This paper proposes proactive eavesdropping as a means to improve the performance of wireless information surveillance through authorized monitors. When no monitor is available, unsuspicious users are authorized to surveil suspicious users, ensuring their quality-of-service (QoS). The paper focuses on optimizing the transmit power and IGS circularity coefficient to maximize the average eavesdropping rate and shows that IGS outperforms proper Gaussian signaling in most cases.