Secrecy performance of dual-hop decode-and-forward relay system with diversity combining at the eavesdropper

We have considered a dual-hop wireless network consisting of a decode-and-forward (DF) relay in presence of an eavesdropper. Relay can correctly decode and retransmit only if the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) meets a particular threshold. The eavesdropper can tap signals both from the relay and the source. The performance of the maximal ratio combining (MRC) and selection combining (SC) diversity at the eavesdropper is investigated. Whether knowledge of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter is available or not is considered for the performance evaluation in secrecy outage probability and ergodic secrecy rate. Asymptotic analyses of performances are provided. We show that direct link has a significant impact on system secrecy. It is found that secrecy performances are the best if the relay is always able to decode correctly. We also found that knowledge of CSI helps to achieve better secrecy at lower rate. It is observed that unbalance created due to constraint on either of the source-relay link average SNR or relay-destination link average SNR does not yield similar secrecy outage performance but both can limit the secrecy outage performance. On the contrary, it is found that only source-relay link quality can limit the ergodic secrecy rate performance.