Secrecy Outage and Diversity Analysis of Multiple Cooperating Source-Destination Pairs

We study the physical-layer security of multiple source-destination (SD) pairs communicating within a wireless network in the face of an eavesdropper attacking the SD pairs. In order to protect the wireless transmission against eavesdropping, we propose a cooperation framework relying on two stages. Specifically, an SD pair is selected to access the total allocated spectrum using an appropriately designed scheme at the beginning of the first stage. The other source nodes (SNs) simultaneously transmit their data to the SN of the above-mentioned SD pair relying on orthogonal resources during the first stage. Then, the SN of the chosen SD pair transmits the data packets containing its own messages and the other SNs’ messages to its dedicated destination node (DN) in the second stage. Finally, this dedicated DN will forward all the other DNs’ data to the application center via the core network. We conceive a specific SD pair selection scheme, termed as the transmit antenna selection aided source-destination pair selection (TAS-SDPS). We continue by deriving the secrecy outage probability (SOP) expressions of both the TAS-SDPS conceived, as well as of the conventional round-robin source-destination pair selection (RSDPS) and of the conventional non-cooperative (Non-coop) schemes for comparison. Furthermore, we carry out the secrecy diversity gain analysis in the high main-to-eavesdropper ratio (MER) region, showing that the TAS-SDPS scheme is capable of achieving the maximum attainable secrecy diversity order. Additionally, we show that increasing the number of transmitting pairs will reduce the SOP, whilst increasing the secrecy diversity order of the TAS-SDPS scheme. It is demonstrated that the SOP of the TAS-SDPS scheme is better than that of the RSDPS and of the conventional Non-coop schemes. We also demonstrate that the secrecy diversity gain of the proposed TAS-SDPS scheme is $M$ times that of the RSDPS scheme in the high-MER region, where $M$ is the number of the SD pairs.