Transmitter selection for secrecy against colluding eavesdroppers with backhaul uncertainty

Abstract

Due to the exponential growth of interconnected devices and reduced cell coverage, beyond fifth-generation networks will be dense. Thus, instead of wired backhaul, wireless backhaul will be cost-effective and flexible. For security in multi-transmitter systems, sub-optimal and optimal transmitter selection schemes exist. However, including backhaul activity knowledge available (BKA) and backhaul activity knowledge unavailable (BKU) cases and transmitter selection schemes, there is no generalized secrecy analysis method. Moreover, evaluation of the ergodic secrecy rate (ESR) of the optimal selection schemes is impossible using existing solution approaches. To address these, two sub-optimal and optimal transmitter selection schemes are proposed for a small-cell multi-transmitter system in BKU or BKA cases in the presence of multiple colluding eavesdroppers. The distribution of the ratio of the destination channel SNR and eavesdropping channel SNR is derived, thereby providing different secrecy performance metrics uniformly irrespective of selection schemes and BKU or BKA cases. Simplified asymptotic expressions are provided to elucidate the influence of the system parameters and of the backhaul reliability. It is observed that the secrecy performance improves when the knowledge of backhaul link activity is utilized, and the improvement is most noticeable when the backhaul is highly unreliable. It is also observed that while the secrecy performance degrades with an increasing number of eavesdroppers, neither the asymptotic saturation value of the secrecy outage probability nor the rate of improvement of the ESR with signal-to-noise-ratio depends on the number of eavesdroppers. © 2023 The Authors. IET Communications published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Institution of Engineering and Technology.