End-to-End Secure Connection Probability in MultiLayer Networks with Heterogeneous Rician Fading

TL;DR

This paper derives a closed-form expression for the end-to-end secure connection probability in multi-hop non-terrestrial networks with heterogeneous Rician fading, improving accuracy over previous models and validated with real-world data.

Contribution

It provides the first analytical formula for secure connection probability in multi-layer NTNs with Rician fading, supporting better security performance evaluation.

Findings

Proposed formula estimates SCP with 1% error in most cases

Doubles accuracy compared to conventional schemes

Accurately captures security trends in real-world datasets

Abstract

Ensuring physical-layer security in non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) is challenging due to their global coverage and multi-hop relaying across heterogeneous network layers, where the locations and channels of potential eavesdroppers are typically unknown. In this work, we derive a tractable closedform expression of the end-to-end secure connection probability (SCP) of multi-hop relay routes under heterogeneous Rician fading. The resulting formula shares the same functional form as prior Rayleigh-based approximations but for the coefficients, thereby providing analytical support for the effectiveness of heuristic posterior coefficient calibration adopted in prior work. Numerical experiments under various conditions show that the proposed scheme estimates the SCP with an 1%p error in most cases; and doubles the accuracy compared with the conventional scheme even in the worst case. As a case study, we apply the proposed framework to real-world space-air-groundsea integrated network dataset, showing that the derived SCP accurately captures observed security trends in practical settings.