Security enhancement of cooperative single carrier systems

In this paper, the impact of multiple active eavesdroppers on cooperative single carrier systems with multiple relays and multiple destinations is examined. To achieve the secrecy diversity gains in the form of opportunistic selection, a two-stage scheme is proposed for joint relay and destination selection, in which, after the selection of the relay with the minimum effective maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to a cluster of eavesdroppers, the destination that has the maximum SNR from the chosen relay is selected. To accurately assess the secrecy performance, exact and asymptotic expressions are obtained in closed form for several security metrics, including the secrecy outage probability, probability of nonzero secrecy rate, and ergodic secrecy rate in frequency selective fading. Based on the asymptotic analysis, key design parameters, such as secrecy diversity gain, secrecy array gain, secrecy multiplexing gain, and power cost, are characterized, from which new insights are drawn. In addition, it is concluded that secrecy performance limits occur when the average received power at the eavesdropper is proportional to the counterpart at the destination. In particular, for the secrecy outage probability, it is confirmed that the secrecy diversity gain collapses to zero with outage floor, whereas for the ergodic secrecy rate, it is confirmed that its slope collapses to zero with capacity ceiling.