Secure Wireless Multicasting through Nakagami-<i>m</i> Fading Channels with Multi-Hop Relaying

Abstract

The additional diversity gain provided by the relays improves the secrecy capacity of communications system significantly. The multiple hops in the relaying system is an important technique to improve this diversity gain. The development of an analytical mathematical model of ensuring security in multicasting through fading channels incorporating this benefit of multi-hop relaying is still an open problem. Motivated by this issue, this paper considers a secure wireless multicasting scenario employing multi-hop relaying technique over frequency selective Nakagami-m fading channel and develops an analytical mathematical model to ensure the security against multiple eavesdroppers. This mathematical model has been developed based on the closedform analytical expressions of the probability of non-zero secrecy multicast capacity (PNSMC) and the secure outage probability for multicasting (SOPM) to ensure the security in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. Moreover, the effects of the fading parameter of multicast channel, the number of hops and eavesdropper are investigated. The results show that the security in multicasting through Nakagami-m fading channel with multi-hop relaying system is more sensitive to the number of hops and eavesdroppers. The fading of multicast channel helps to improve the secrecy multicast capacity and is not the enemy of security in multicasting.