Secrecy outage of threshold-based cooperative relay network with and without direct links

In this paper, we investigate the secrecy outage performance of a dual-hop decode-and-forward (DF) threshold-based cooperative relay network, both with and without the direct links between source-eavesdropper and source-destination. Without assuming that all the relays can always perfectly decode, here we consider that only those relays who satisfy predetermined threshold can correctly decode the message. We have investigated the outage probability of optimal relay selection scheme, when either full instantaneous channel state information (ICSI) or statistical channel state information (SCSI) of all the links is available. We have shown that CSI knowledge at the transmitter can improve secrecy, and the amount of improvement for the outage probability is more when the required rate is low and for low operating SNR. Asymptotic and diversity gain analysis of the secrecy outage for both the single relay and multi-relay system is obtained, when average SNRs of source-relay and relay-destination links are equal or unequal. We have shown that the improvement in predetermined threshold, eavesdropper channel quality, direct links, and required secrecy rate significantly affects the secrecy performance of the system.