Secrecy outage of cooperative relay network with and without eavesdropper's direct link

Abstract

In this paper, a source communicates to the destination with the cooperation of a relay, in the presence of an eavesdropper. All the links undergo Rayleigh fading and perfect decoding at the relays is not considered. The secrecy outage probability expression is evaluated for a decode-and-forward (DF) dual-hop cooperative relay network, both with and without the presence of direct source to eavesdropper transmission link. The performance of the maximal ratio combining (MRC) and selection combining (SC) diversity at the eavesdropper is investigated. Asymptotic and diversity gain analysis for both the single relay and multi-relay system is obtained, when average SNRs of source-relay and relay-destination links are balanced or unbalanced. We have shown that the increase in target secrecy rate and eavesdropper channel quality significantly affects the outage performance of the system. We have investigated the outage probability of optimal relay selection scheme, when either full instantaneous channel state information (ICSI) or statistical channel state information (SCSI) of all the links is available and have shown that there is improvement in the secrecy performance with the increase in the number of relays.