Secure communications over opportunistic-relay channels

Marouan Jilani, Tomoaki Otsuki Ohtsuki

A. S. M. Badrudduza, M. Z. I. Sarkar, Milton Kumar Kundu

Sarjana Shabab, Md. Zahurul Islam

Sajad Poursajadi, Mohammad Hossein Madani

In this study, we deal with a cooperative wireless communications system of security constraints in which there is no knowledge about channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdropper. In order to improve the tradeoff between security and reliability, we opportunistically employ relays via an incremental and selective cooperation with respect to the CSI of the main link. In this cooperation, named as opportunistic cooperative transmission (OCT), the first priority is communication through the direct link as far as possible. However, a relay that has the best link to the main destination is employed for retransmitting the source information when the direct link is so weak which cannot provide a specific quality. In fact, since improving the reliability of the favorable communications by use of the relays increases the risk of successful interception by the eavesdropper at the same time, the OCT scheme tries to avoid excess of rebroadcasting the secret information by the relays whenever the direct link is strong enough; otherwise it employs an opportunistically selected relayed link. Hence, it can improve the security for a specific level of reliability and vice versa. We derive closed-form expressions for the security-reliability tradeoff (SRT) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) of the OCT scheme. Moreover, we provide asymptotic analyses which are illustrative on the security behavior of the proposed scheme. Finally, simulation results are presented which confirm validity of the analysis and reveal the desired performance of OCT in terms of both SRT and SOP.

Nkm Nieke Aerts

Xiazhi Lai, Lisheng Fan, Xianfu Lei +3 more

In this paper, we study decode-and-forward relaying networks in the presence of direct links, where they are used by the eavesdropper to overhear the confidential message from the source and relay. The secure data transmission can go through from either the direct or the relaying branch, and we focus on the practical communication scenarios, where the main and eavesdropper channels are correlated. Although traditional opportunistic selection techniques can choose one better branch to ensure the secure performance, it needs to continuously know the channel state information (CSI) of both branches and may result in a high branch switching rate. To overcome these limitations, we propose a distributed secure switch-and-stay combining (DSSSC) protocol, where only one between direct and relaying branches is activated to assist the secure data transmission, and the switching occurs when the branch cannot support the secure communication any longer. The DSSSC protocol uses either the instantaneous or the statistics of the eavesdropping CSI. For both cases, we quantify the impact of correlated fading on secure communication by deriving an analytical expression for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) as well as an asymptotic expression for the high main-to-eavesdropper ratio region. From the asymptotic SOP, we can conclude that the DSSSC can achieve the optimal secure performance of opportunistic selection with less implementation complexity, and the channel correlation can further enhance the transmission security.