Biblio

This paper investigates the secrecy outage performance of an energy harvesting-based dual-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) mixed radio-frequency/underwater optical wireless communication (RF/UOWC) system. A single-antenna source node (S) is considered, communicating with one legitimate destination node (D) with the aid of a multi-antenna AF relay (R) device. In this setup, the relay node receives the incoming signal from S via an RF link, which is subject to Nakagami-m fading, then performs maximal-ratio-combining (MRC) followed by a fixed-gain amplification, before transmitting it to the destination via a UOWC link, subject to mixture Exponential-Gamma fading. Assuming the presence of a malicious eavesdropper attempting to intercept the S- R hop, a tight approximate expression for the secrecy outage probability is retrieved. The derived results provide useful insights into the influence of key system parameters on the secrecy outage performance. Our analytical results are corroborated through computer simulations, which verifies their validity.

In this work, Automatic-Repeat-Request (ARQ) and Maximal Ratio Combination (MRC), have been jointly exploited to enhance the confidentiality of wireless services requested by a legitimate user (Bob) against an eavesdropper (Eve). The obtained security performance is analyzed using Packet Error Rate (PER), where the exact PER gap between Bob and Eve is determined. PER is proposed as a new practical security metric in cross layers (Physical/MAC) security design since it reflects the influence of upper layers mechanisms, and it can be linked with Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for various digital services such as voice and video. Exact PER formulas for both Eve and Bob in i.i.d Rayleigh fading channel are derived. The simulation and theoretical results show that the employment of ARQ mechanism and MRC on a signal level basis before demodulation can significantly enhance data security for certain services at specific SNRs. However, to increase and ensure the security of a specific service at any SNR, adaptive modulation is proposed to be used along with the aforementioned scheme. Analytical and simulation studies demonstrate orders of magnitude difference in PER performance between eavesdroppers and intended receivers.