Physical Layer Secrecy Performance of Multi-hop Decode-and-Forward Relay Networks with Multiple Eavesdroppers

Today, wireless networks become the most popular way to communicate. However, information can be easily eavesdropped or extracted by eavesdroppers due to the broadcast nature of wireless communication. Multi-hop relay communication systems provide for higher secrecy performance than direct transmission techniques. In this paper, the physical layer secrecy performance of multi-hop decode-and-forward (DF) relay network is investigated in the presence of multiple passive eavesdroppers over Nakagami-m fading channels. To do so, we find out the exact closed-form expressions of existence probability of secrecy capacity and secrecy outage probability by using statistical characteristics of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Importantly, these expressions are in more general forms compared to other results in the literature. The proposed results show a quite agreement between numerical analysis and equivalent Monte-Carlo simulations.