High SNR performance of amplify-and-forward relaying in Rayleigh fading wiretap channels

This paper investigates amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying for secrecy in quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels. We consider a four-node network where a helping node intends to enhance secrecy of the transmission between the source and the destination in presence of a passive eavesdropper. In this scenario, the common assumption of full CSI on the eavesdropper´s channels is not realistic, and thus, we study the performance of cooperation from an outage perspective. Starting from the secrecy outage probability, we introduce a novel measure, the conditional secrecy outage probability to analyze the performance of AF. In particular, we derive closed-form expressions for AF for these two secrecy measures under a high SNR assumption. Moreover, we use numerical examples to illustrate our results and to characterize the effect of the nodes´ geometry. We also show numerically how AF improves the secrecy performance in comparison to direct transmission in terms of outage probability and secure throughput.