Relay selection for wireless communications against eavesdropping: a security-reliability trade-off perspective

Abstract

This article examines secrecy coding aided wireless communications from a source to a destination in the presence of an eavesdropper from an SRT perspective. Explicitly, security is quantified in terms of the intercept probability experienced at the eavesdropper, while the outage probability encountered at the destination is used to measure transmission reliability. We characterize the SRT of conventional direct transmission from the source to the destination and show that if the outage probability is increased, the intercept probability decreases, and vice versa. We first demonstrate that the employment of relay nodes for assisting source-destination transmission is capable of defending against eavesdropping, followed by quantifying the benefits of SRS as well as MRS schemes. More specifically, in the SRS scheme, only the single "best" relay is selected for forwarding the source signal to the destination, whereas the MRS scheme allows multiple relays to participate in this process. It is illustrated that both the SRS and MRS schemes achieve a better SRT than conventional direct transmission, especially upon increasing the number of relays. Numerical results also show that, as expected, MRS outperforms SRS in terms of its SRT. Additionally, we present some open challenges and future directions for wireless relay aided physical-layer security.

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ORCID for Lajos Hanzo: orcid.org/0000-0002-2636-5214

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