Eavesdropping area for evaluating the security of wireless communications

Abstract

Compared with wired communication, the wireless communication link is more vulnerable to be attacked or eavesdropped because of its broadcast nature. To prevent eavesdropping, many researches on transmission techniques or cryptographic methods are carried out. This paper proposes a new index parameter named as eavesdropping area, to evaluate the anti-eavesdropping performance of wireless system. Given the locations of legitimate transmitter and receiver, eavesdropping area index describes the total area of eavesdropping regions where messages can be wiretapped in the whole evaluating region. This paper gives detailed explanations about its concept and deduces mathematical formulas about performance curves based on region classification. Corresponding key system parameters are analyzed, including the characteristics of eavesdropping region, transmitted beam pattern, beam direction, receiver sensitivity, eavesdropping sensitivity, path loss exponent and so on. The proposed index can give an insight on the confirmation of high-risk eavesdropping region and formulating optimal transmitting scheme for the confidential communications to decrease the eavesdropping probability.