Secure Multiuser Scheduling in Downlink Dual-Hop Regenerative Relay Networks Over Nakagami- $m$ Fading Channels

In this paper, we investigate the secrecy performance of multiuser dual-hop relay networks where a base station (BS) communicates with multiple legitimate users through the assistance of a trustful regenerative relay in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. In particular, the maximal ratio transmission scheme is exploited at the BS and a threshold-based multiuser scheduling scheme is employed over the legitimate users, while concerning the imperfect decoding at the regenerative relay. To evaluate the secrecy performance of the considered system, two practical situations are addressed based on the availability of eavesdropper’s channel state information (CSI), i.e., Scenario I, where the eavesdropper’s CSI is not available at the relay, and Scenario II, where the eavesdropper’s CSI is available at the relay. For both the scenarios, we further consider two eavesdropping modes, i.e., colluding eavesdropping and non-colluding eavesdropping. For Scenario I, new exact and asymptotic closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) are derived. For Scenario II, we derive new exact and asymptotic closed-form expressions for the ergodic secrecy rate (ESR). The asymptotic SOPs demonstrate that the secrecy diversity order is independent of the number of legitimate users ${N_{mathrm{B}}}$ and eavesdroppers ${N_{mathrm{E}}}$ , the number of antennas equipped at eavesdroppers ${A_{mathrm{E}}}$ , as well as the fading factor of the wiretap channel ${m_{mathrm{E}}}$ . Furthermore, we also determine the secrecy multiplexing gain and the power cost to explicitly quantify the impact of the legitimate channel and wiretap channel on the ESR. Our findings demonstrate that increasing the switching threshold, the number of antennas at the BS, and the number of legitimate users has a positive impact on secrecy performance.