Secrecy Performance Analysis of Space-to-Ground Optical Satellite Communications

Abstract

To cope with the scarcity of radio frequency (RF) counterparts, free-space optics (FSO) based on satellite communications technologies have recently gained a lot of interest. Firstly, this investigates the security of space-to-ground intensity modulation/direct detection FSO satellite communications in various effects from the physical world, such as propagation loss, beam misalignment, cloud attenuation, and fading caused by atmospheric turbulence. Next, A wiretap channel composed of a genuine broadcaster Alice (i.e., the satellite), a legitimate user Bob, and an eavesdropper Eve is considered over turbulent channels characterized by the Fisher-Snedecor $\mathcal{F}$ distribution. In addition, the closed-form expressions of the secrecy performance metrics, including average secrecy capacity, secrecy outage probability, and strictly positive secrecy capacity, are derived in our study. Finally, the numerical findings indicate that the satellite altitude of 600 km should be used to achieve a secrecy outage of roughly 50% for the whole turbulence regime. In addition, high levels of cloud liquid water content (CLWC) could improve the secrecy performance as it is shown that, the average secrecy capacity increases by about 12% when the CLWC increases from $1\mathrm{~mg}/\mathrm{m}^{3}$ to $2\mathrm{~mg}/\mathrm{m}^{3}$.