Intercept Probability Analysis of Cooperative Wireless Networks with Best Relay Selection in the Presence of Eavesdropping Attack

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the intercept probability in cooperative wireless networks with best relay selection under eavesdropping attacks, deriving closed-form expressions and demonstrating the scheme's superiority over traditional methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel best relay selection scheme for physical-layer security and provides analytical expressions showing its effectiveness against eavesdropping.

Findings

Best relay selection outperforms direct transmission and max-min relay schemes.

Intercept probability decreases as the number of relays increases.

Proposed scheme offers significant security improvements in Rayleigh fading channels.

Abstract

Due to the broadcast nature of wireless medium, wireless communication is extremely vulnerable to eavesdropping attack. Physical-layer security is emerging as a new paradigm to prevent the eavesdropper from interception by exploiting the physical characteristics of wireless channels, which has recently attracted a lot of research attentions. In this paper, we consider the physical-layer security in cooperative wireless networks with multiple decode-and-forward (DF) relays and investigate the best relay selection in the presence of eavesdropping attack. For the comparison purpose, we also examine the conventional direct transmission without relay and traditional max-min relay selection. We derive closed-form intercept probability expressions of the direct transmission, traditional max-min relay selection, and proposed best relay selection schemes in Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical results show that the proposed best relay selection scheme strictly outperforms the traditional direct transmission and max-min relay selection schemes in terms of intercept probability. In addition, as the number of relays increases, the intercept probabilities of both traditional max-min relay selection and proposed best relay selection schemes decrease significantly, showing the advantage of exploiting multiple relays against eavesdropping attack.