Secrecy Performance of Land Mobile Satellite Systems With Imperfect Channel Estimation and Multiple Eavesdroppers

Abstract

The inherent broadcast nature has exposed the land mobile satellite (LMS) communication systems to severe security threats in both the civil and military applications. This paper investigates the secrecy performance of a Shadowed-Rician fading multi-antenna LMS communication system with imperfect channel estimation, which consists of a satellite, a legitimate receiver and a cluster of unauthorized eavesdroppers who want to overhear the confidential message. Specifically, the analytical expressions for the probability of non-zero secrecy capacity are derived in terms of the Meijer-G functions, which provide an efficient means to evaluate the secrecy performance of the system. Then, both the exact and asymptotic secrecy outage probability expressions of the considered system are obtained. Furthermore, based on the simple asymptotic secrecy outage probability, we can reveal two key performance metrics, namely, the secrecy diversity order and secrecy array gain. Finally, simulation results are carried out to validate the theoretical results and show the superiority of employing multiple antennae in enhancing the secrecy performance for LMS communication systems. Our findings suggest that the secrecy diversity order only depends on the number of antennas at the legitimate receiver, and is independent of the imperfect channel estimation and the shadowing severities of both the main and eavesdropper channels.