High SNR performance of amplify-and-forward relaying in Rayleigh fading wiretap channels

Abstract

This paper investigates amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying for secrecy in quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels. We consider a four-node network where a helping node intends to enhance secrecy of the transmission between the source and the destination in presence of a passive eavesdropper. In this scenario, the common assumption of full CSI on the eavesdropper's channels is not realistic, and thus, we study the performance of cooperation from an outage perspective. Starting from the secrecy outage probability, we introduce a novel measure, the conditional secrecy outage probability to analyze the performance of AF. In particular, we derive closed-form expressions for AF for these two secrecy measures under a high SNR assumption. Moreover, we use numerical examples to illustrate our results and to characterize the effect of the nodes' geometry. We also show numerically how AF improves the secrecy performance in comparison to direct transmission in terms of outage probability and secure throughput.