On the Physical Layer Security of a Regenerative Relay-Based mixed RF/UOWC

This paper investigates the secrecy outage performance of a dual-hop decode-and-forward (DE) mixed radio-frequency/underwater optical wireless communication (RF/UOWC) system. We consider a one-antenna source node (S), communicating with one legitimate destination node (D) via a multi-antenna DF relay (R) node. In this context, the relay node receives the incoming signal from S via an RF link, which is subject to Rayleigh fading, then performes selection-combining (SC) followed by decoding and then re-encoding for transmission to the destination over a UOWC link, subject to mixture Exponential-Gamma fading. Under the assumption of eavesdroppers attempting to intercept the S-R (RF side), a closed-form expression for the secrecy outage probability is derived. Our analytical results are corroborated through computer simulations, which verifies their validity.