Physical Layer Security-Aware Routing and Performance Tradeoffs in Ad Hoc Networks
It addresses a gap in physical layer security for multi-hop networks, focusing on tradeoffs between security and quality of service, which is incremental as it extends prior single-hop studies.
This paper tackles the problem of balancing communication quality and security in multi-hop ad hoc networks by deriving closed-form expressions for connection and secrecy outage probabilities, and proposes routing algorithms to optimize these tradeoffs, with simulations validating the theoretical analysis.
The application of physical layer security in ad hoc networks has attracted considerable academic attention recently. However, the available studies mainly focus on the single-hop and two-hop network scenarios, and the price in terms of degradation of communication quality of service (QoS) caused by improving security is largely uninvestigated. As a step to address these issues, this paper explores the physical layer security-aware routing and performance tradeoffs in a multi-hop ad hoc network. Specifically, for any given end-to-end path we first derive its connection outage probability (COP) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) in closed-form, which serve as the performance metrics of communication QoS and transmission security, respectively. Based on the closed-form expressions, we then study the security-QoS tradeoffs to minimize COP (resp. SOP) conditioned on that SOP (resp. COP) is guaranteed. With the help of analysis of a given path, we further propose the routing algorithms which can achieve the optimal performance tradeoffs for any pair of source and destination nodes in a distributed manner. Finally, simulation and numerical results are presented to validate the efficiency of our theoretical analysis, as well as to illustrate the security-QoS tradeoffs and the routing performance.