Improved relay selection for decode-and-forward cooperative wireless networks under secrecy rate maximization

Privacy and security have an increasingly important role in wireless networks. A secure communication enables a legitimate destination to successfully retrieve information sent by a source, while it disables the eavesdropper (illegitimate destination) to interpret the intercepted information. Physical (PHY) layer security approaches for wireless communications can prevent eavesdropping without encryption. It exploits the physical characteristics of the wireless channel in order to transmit messages securely. They are typically feasible when the source-destination channel is better than the source-eavesdropper channel. Cooperative schemes are a means to improve the performance of secure wireless communications. We propose an improved relay selection scheme, based on source-eavesdropper channel SNR restriction, that will guarantee the best secrecy rate at the destination under QoS condition. Performance has been studied in terms of secrecy rate, outage probability and average error probability. Simulations shows that the proposed scheme outperforms in terms of the secrecy rate at the destination when compared to techniques in the literature.