Physical Layer Security-Aware Routing and Performance Tradeoffs in Ad Hoc Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates physical layer security-aware routing in multi-hop ad hoc networks, deriving performance metrics and proposing algorithms to optimize security and QoS tradeoffs, validated through simulations.

Contribution

It introduces closed-form expressions for outage probabilities, analyzes security-QoS tradeoffs, and develops distributed routing algorithms for optimal performance in multi-hop networks.

Findings

Closed-form COP and SOP expressions derived

Security-QoS tradeoffs characterized and optimized

Routing algorithms achieve near-optimal performance

Abstract

The application of physical layer security in ad hoc networks has attracted considerable academic attention recently. However, the available studies mainly focus on the single-hop and two-hop network scenarios, and the price in terms of degradation of communication quality of service (QoS) caused by improving security is largely uninvestigated. As a step to address these issues, this paper explores the physical layer security-aware routing and performance tradeoffs in a multi-hop ad hoc network. Specifically, for any given end-to-end path we first derive its connection outage probability (COP) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) in closed-form, which serve as the performance metrics of communication QoS and transmission security, respectively. Based on the closed-form expressions, we then study the security-QoS tradeoffs to minimize COP (resp. SOP) conditioned on that SOP (resp. COP) is guaranteed. With the help of analysis of a given path, we further propose the routing algorithms which can achieve the optimal performance tradeoffs for any pair of source and destination nodes in a distributed manner. Finally, simulation and numerical results are presented to validate the efficiency of our theoretical analysis, as well as to illustrate the security-QoS tradeoffs and the routing performance.