Impact of Mutual Influence between Bob and Eve on the Secrecy of Diffusion-Based Molecular Timing Channels

Abstract

Secrecy in the context of molecular communication is a relatively unexplored area. The presence of an eavesdropping (Eve) unit in a molecular communication channel can pose a significant threat to the integrity of the information being transmitted from the legitimate transmitter (Alice) to the legitimate receiver (Bob). The presence of both Bob and Eve simultaneously in a multiparticle diffusion-based molecular timing (DB-MT) channel leads to a mutual influence between them. This mutual influence can play a significant role in analyzing the secrecy performance of DB-MT channels. Motivated by this, in this letter, we analyze the mutual influence between Bob and Eve in terms of the correlation (ρ) between their respective distances from Alice and its impact on the secrecy performance of the system. Specifically, we calculate the closed-form expression of the secrecy outage probability (SOP) metric by considering the impact of ρ on the SOP of the system. Numerical results corroborate the derived analytical findings. © 2012 IEEE.