Physical Layer Security of Wireless Transmissions Over Fading Channels

The open nature of the wireless medium makes the wireless communication
susceptible to eavesdropping attacks. In addition, fading and shadowing significantly
degrade the performance of the communication system in the wireless networks. A
versatile approach to circumvent the issues of eavesdropping attacks while exploiting the
physical properties of the wireless channel is the so-called physical layer-security. In this
work, we consider a model in which two legitimate users communicate in the presence of
an eavesdropper. We investigate the performance of the wireless network at the physical
layer that is subject to a variety of fading environments that may be modeled by the
Rayleigh, Nakagami-m, and Generalized-K distributions, to mention a few. We use the
secrecy outage probability (SOP) as the standard performance metrics to study the
performance of the wireless networks. We propose two different approaches to compute
the secrecy outage probability, and derive explicit expressions for the secrecy outage probability that allow us to characterize the performance of the wireless networks.
Specifically, we use a direct integration approach as well as a Taylor series base approach
to evaluate the secrecy outage probability. Finally, we use computer simulations, based
on MATLAB, to confirm the analytical results.