Secure and Reliable Transmission with Cooperative Relays in Two-Hop Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes secure and reliable two-hop relay wireless networks with finite nodes, determining the maximum number of eavesdroppers tolerated for specified secrecy and reliability, using two relay selection protocols.

Contribution

It provides exact results on eavesdropper tolerance in finite networks and compares two relay selection protocols for security and load balancing.

Findings

Optimal relay selection offers better security but less load balancing.

Random relay selection provides good load balancing with slightly reduced security.

Theoretical limits on eavesdropper numbers ensure specified secrecy and reliability.

Abstract

This work considers the secure and reliable information transmission in two-hop relay wireless networks without the information of both eavesdropper channels and locations. While the previous work on this problem mainly studied infinite networks and their asymptotic behavior and scaling law results, this papers focuses on a more practical network with finite number of system nodes and explores the corresponding exact results on the number of eavesdroppers the network can tolerant to ensure a desired secrecy and reliability. For achieving secure and reliable information transmission in a finite network, two transmission protocols are considered in this paper, one adopts an optimal but complex relay selection process with less load balance capacity while the other adopts a random but simple relay selection process with good load balance capacity. Theoretical analysis is further provided to determine the exact and maximum number of independent and also uniformly distributed eavesdroppers one network can tolerate to satisfy a specified requirement in terms of the maximum secrecy outage probability and maximum transmission outage probability allowed.