Opportunistic Relay in Multicast Channels with Generalized Shadowed Fading Effects: A Physical Layer Security Perspective

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how opportunistic relay selection can significantly improve physical layer security in multicast wireless networks affected by shadowed fading, providing analytical expressions and insights into system parameter effects.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive model for secrecy performance in multicast relay networks over generalized shadowed fading channels, unifying and extending previous analyses.

Findings

Opportunistic relaying mitigates fading and shadowing effects.

Analytical expressions for secrecy metrics are derived.

System parameters significantly influence secrecy performance.

Abstract

Through ordinary transmissions over wireless multicast networks are greatly hampered due to the simultaneous presence of fading and shadowing of wireless channels, secure transmissions can be enhanced by properly exploiting random attributes of the propagation medium. This study focuses on the utilization of those attributes to enhance the physical layer security (PLS) performance of a dual-hop wireless multicast network over kappa-mu shadow-fading channel under the wiretapping attempts of multiple eavesdroppers. In order to improve the secrecy level, the best relay selection strategy among multiple relays is employed. Performance analysis is carried out based on the mathematical modeling in terms of analytical expressions of non-zero secrecy capacity probability, secure outage probability, and ergodic secrecy capacity over multicast relay networks. Capitalizing on those expressions, the effects of system parameters, i.e., fading, shadowing, the number of antennas, destination receivers, eavesdroppers, and relays, on the secrecy performance are investigated. Numerical results show that the detrimental impacts caused by fading and shadowing can be remarkably mitigated using the well-known opportunistic relaying technique. Moreover, the proposed model unifies secrecy analysis of several classical models, thereby exhibiting enormous versatility than the existing works.