Eavesdropper tolerance capability study in two-hop cooperative wireless networks

Abstract

This work considers the maximum number of eavesdroppers that can be tolerated (i.e., eavesdropper tolerance capability) by applying the secure and reliable transmission protocol with cooperative relays in Two-Hop wireless networks with passive and independently-operating eavesdroppers of unknown location and channel information. While previous works on this problem mainly studied either the scaling law results for infinite networks, or bounds on the maximum number of eavesdroppers in finite networks, this paper proposes an approach to determine the exact maximum number of eavesdroppers that can be present in more practical network scenarios by taking into account both the reliability and security requirements. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on the study of exact maximum number of eavesdroppers. Theoretical analysis and numerical results are further provided to determine the eavesdropper tolerance capability to satisfy a specified requirement in terms of secrecy outage probability and transmission outage probability, and to explore the trade-offs among eavesdropper tolerance capability and other system parameters.