Securing cooperative vehicular networks amid obstructing vehicles and mixed fading channels

Abstract

Smart cities (SCs) were founded on the basis of the Internet of Vehicles paradigm, aiming to enhance the quality of life. Despite not having a unique composition, the intelligent transportation services (ITS) is a key component in most of the SCs. The ITS integrates the new communication systems along with the traditional transportation systems, forming a universal network of static and vehicular entities communicating over wireless broadcast channels. In addition to its vulnerability to co-channel interference (CCI), eavesdropping, and fading, the vehicle-to-vehicle communication channels could be subjected to shadowed fading. That is due to the probabilistic obstruction by big vehicles. Hence, degrading the signal-to-noise ratio at the receiving vehicle severely. This work evaluates the secrecy performance of a practical cooperative vehicular relaying network in terms of its secrecy outage probability (SOP). Due to the probabilistic existence of a vehicular obstacle, three different communication scenarios are considered and a novel closed-form analytical expression for the SOP is obtained over mixed Nakagami-m fading and Nakagami-N-Gamma shadowed fading channels. The system comprises legitimate source and destination operating in full-duplex mode, thus imposing CCI on both the relay and the passive eavesdropper. The result demonstrate the impacts of the secrecy data rate threshold, the strength of shadowing, the density of the obstructing vehicles, and several parameters on the SOP. High levels of shadowing strength and density of obstructing vehicles significantly degrades the secrecy performance by increasing the SOP. Accordingly, adopting the mixed fading channel model is of great importance for practical network modeling.