Secrecy Performance of Finite-Sized In-Band Selective Relaying Systems With Unreliable Backhaul and Cooperative Eavesdroppers

This paper investigates the secrecy performance of a finite-sized in-band selective relaying system with M transmitters connected via unreliable backhaul links, N decode-and-forward relays, and K collaborative eavesdroppers. To send the source message to the destination, a transmitter-relay pair that achieves the highest end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio is selected for transmissions, while the K eavesdroppers combine all the received signals from the selected transmitter and relay using maximal ratio combining. The proposed model introduces backhaul reliability and eavesdropping probability parameters to investigate practical constraints on the transmitter-relay cooperation and eavesdropper collaboration, respectively. Closed-form expressions are derived for the secrecy outage probability, probability of non-zero achievable secrecy rate, and ergodic secrecy rate for non-identical frequency-selective fading channels with robust cyclic-prefixed single carrier transmissions. These results show that the asymptotic secrecy outage probability and probability of non-zero achievable secrecy rate are exclusively determined by the number of transmitters M and their corresponding set of backhaul reliability levels. Under unreliable backhaul connections, it is found that the secrecy diversity gain is determined by M, N, and the number of multipath components in the frequency selective fading channels. Link-level simulations are conducted to verify the derived impacts of backhaul reliability and collaborative eavesdropping on the secrecy performance.