Emerging Trends in ICT Security: Chapter 14. Analyzing the Ergodic Secrecy Rates of Cooperative Amplify-and-Forward Relay Networks over Generalized Fading … in Computer Science and Applied Computing)

Wireless physical layer security approaches can prevent eavesdropping without upper layer data encryption. However, such techniques are hampered by time-varying wireless channel conditions and they are typically feasible only when the legitimate partners in the Wyner’s wire-tap channel model have an advantage over the source-eavesdropper channels. Node cooperation is an effective strategy to overcome this challenge and enhance the performance of secure wireless communications. This chapter addresses secure wireless communications of a source-destination pair with the help of multiple cooperating amplify-and-forward relays in the presence of one or more eavesdroppers. The role of channel fading is characterized in terms of average (ergodic) secure communication rates. Overall, this work establishes the utility of node cooperation for improving secure wireless communications and provides a unified analytical framework for assessing the ergodic secrecy rates of cooperative amplify-and-forward relay networks in a generalized fading environment with independent but non-identically distributed channel fading statistics.