Ergodic Secrecy of Cooperative Secure Wireless Communications

Wireless physical layer security approaches can prevent eavesdropping without upper layer data encryption. But such techniques are hampered by time-varying wireless channel conditions and they are typically feasible only when the legitimate partners in the Wyner´s wire-tap channel model have an advantage over the source-eavesdropper channels. Source rate adaptation and/or node cooperation strategies can be exploited to enhance the performance of secure wireless communications. However, these contributions rather limited to AWGN and Rayleigh channels. This article thus seeks to develop a unified analytical framework for assessing the ergodic secrecy rate of the classical Wyner wire-tap channel in generalized fading environments with independent but non-identically distributed (i.n.d) channel fading statistics and also establish the utility of node cooperations for improving the ergodic secrecy rate when the channel state information is available only at the receiver.