Secure capacity of multi-hop wireless networks with random key pre-distribution

It is usual to quantify the performance of communication networks in terms of achievable throughput or delay. However, as a result of the significant interest in safety-critical application scenarios for wireless networking, security and reliability concerns are gradually emerging at the forefront of wireless networking research. In light of this, it is increasingly crucial to consider secure communication capacity or delay as primary performance measures, and evolve theoretical frameworks that can allow for quantification of the trade-off between security and performance. In this paper, we argue for the need for comprehensive effort in this direction, and present an illustrative example of the same by describing asymptotic secure-capacity results for randomly deployed wireless network where each node is preloaded with a random subset of keys.