Secure Multiple Amplify-and-Forward Relaying With Cochannel Interference

Abstract

We investigate the impact of cochannel interference on the security performance of multiple amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying networks, where $N$ intermediate AF relays assist the data transmission from the source to the destination. The relays are corrupted by multiple cochannel interferers, and the information transmitted from the relays to the destination can be overheard by the eavesdropper. In order to deal with the interference and wiretap, the best out of $N$ relays is selected for security enhancement. To this end, we derive a novel lower bound on the secrecy outage probability (SOP), which is then utilized to present two best relay selection criteria, based on the instantaneous and statistical channel information of the interfering links. For these criteria and the conventional max–min criterion, we quantify the impact of cochannel interference and relay selection by deriving the lower bound on the SOP. Furthermore, we derive the asymptotic SOP for each criterion, to explicitly reveal the impact of transmit power allocation among interferers on the secrecy performance, which offers valuable insights into practical design. We demonstrate that the all selection criteria achieve full secrecy diversity order $N$ , while the proposed two criteria in this paper outperform the conventional max–min scheme.