On the Throughput Cost of Physical Layer Security in Decentralized Wireless Networks

This paper studies the throughput of large-scale decentralized wireless networks with physical layer security constraints. In particular, we are interested in the question of how much throughput needs to be sacrificed for achieving a certain level of security. We consider random networks where the legitimate nodes and the eavesdroppers are distributed according to independent two-dimensional Poisson point processes. The transmission capacity framework is used to characterize the area spectral efficiency of secure transmissions with constraints on both the quality of service (QoS) and the level of security. This framework illustrates the dependence of the network throughput on key system parameters, such as the densities of legitimate nodes and eavesdroppers, as well as the QoS and security constraints. One important finding is that the throughput cost of achieving a moderate level of security is quite low, while throughput must be significantly sacrificed to realize a highly secure network. We also study the use of a secrecy guard zone, which is shown to give a significant improvement on the throughput of networks with high security requirements.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Multi-Source Cooperative Communication with Opportunistic Interference Cancelling Relays

In this paper we present a multi-user cooperative protocol for wireless networks. Two sources transmit simultaneously their information blocks and relays employ opportunistically successive interference cancellation (SIC) in an effort to decode them. An adaptive decode/amplify-and-forward scheme is applied at the relays to the decoded blocks or their sufficient statistic if decoding fails. The main feature of the protocol is that SIC is exploited in a network since more opportunities arise for each block to be decoded as the number of used relays NRU is increased. This feature leads to benefits in terms of diversity and multiplexing gains that are proven with the help of an analytical outage model and a diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) analysis. The performance improvements are achieved without any network synchronization and coordination. In the final part of this work the closed-form outage probability model is used by a novel approach for offline pre-selection of the NRU relays, that have the best SIC performance, from a larger number of NR nodes. The analytical results are corroborated with extensive simulations, while the protocol is compared with orthogonal and multi-user protocols reported in the literature.Comment: in IEEE Transactions on Communications, 201

Performance Analysis of Best Relaying Protocol Selection with Interferences at Relays

In this paper, we investigate the performance of selecting the best protocol between amplify and forward (AF) and decode and forward (DF) in multiple relay networks with multiple interferences at relays. In the selection scheme, the best protocol between AF and DF is selected depending on the comparisons of signal-to-interference and noise ratio (SINR) for all source-relay links. All relays measure the received SINR to decide forwarding signal or not. When SINR is above a certain threshold then DF is used otherwise AF is used. Particularly, we develop an accurate mathematical model for best relaying protocol by considering the effect of interferences to our scheme. Firstly, we derive the asymptotic closed form expression for the symbol error rate (SER) for the system under study. Also we derive an upper and lower bound of symbol error rate and show how they were tight with exact SER. Furthermore an approximate expression for the outage probability is derived. Numerical results are finally presented to validate the theoretical analysis with a different number of relays

Outage Capacity of Incremental Relaying at Low Signal-to-Noise Ratios

We present the \epsilon-outage capacity of incremental relaying at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) in a wireless cooperative network with slow Rayleigh fading channels. The relay performs decode-and-forward and repetition coding is employed in the network, which is optimal in the low SNR regime. We derive an expression on the optimal relay location that maximizes the \epsilon-outage capacity. It is shown that this location is independent of the outage probability and SNR but only depends on the channel conditions represented by a path-loss factor. We compare our results to the \epsilon-outage capacity of the cut-set bound and demonstrate that the ratio between the \epsilon-outage capacity of incremental relaying and the cut-set bound lies within 1/\sqrt{2} and 1. Furthermore, we derive lower bounds on the \epsilon-outage capacity for the case of K relays.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to be presented at VTC Fall 2009 in Anchorage, Alask

Analysis of a Cooperative Strategy for a Large Decentralized Wireless Network

This paper investigates the benefits of cooperation and proposes a relay activation strategy for a large wireless network with multiple transmitters. In this framework, some nodes cooperate with a nearby node that acts as a relay, using the decode-and-forward protocol, and others use direct transmission. The network is modeled as an independently marked Poisson point process and the source nodes may choose their relays from the set of inactive nodes. Although cooperation can potentially lead to significant improvements in the performance of a communication pair, relaying causes additional interference in the network, increasing the average noise that other nodes see. We investigate how source nodes should balance cooperation vs. interference to obtain reliable transmissions, and for this purpose we study and optimize a relay activation strategy with respect to the outage probability. Surprisingly, in the high reliability regime, the optimized strategy consists on the activation of all the relays or none at all, depending on network parameters. We provide a simple closed-form expression that indicates when the relays should be active, and we introduce closed form expressions that quantify the performance gains of this scheme with respect to a network that only uses direct transmission.Comment: Updated version. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Networkin