Multihop Decode-and-Forward Relay Networks: Secrecy Analysis and Relay Position Optimization

Abstract

Relay communication has advantages over direct transmission in terms of secrecy capacity. In this paper, theperformance of secrecy, offered by multihop decode-and-forward relaying, is investigated and compared to its counterpartin direct transmission. Three key performance measures are derived over Rayleigh fading channels: probability of non-zerosecrecy capacity, secure outage probability and secrecy capacity, which are valid for an arbitrary number of hops. Basedon the tractable form of the probability of non-zero secrecy capacity, the optimization problem of trusty relay replacementis also studied. Numerical results indicate that a proper relay replacement can increase the network security without extranetwork resources. The correctness of analytical results is confirmed by using a MATLAB-based independent simulationmodel.