17. Physical Layer Security in Cooperative Vehicular Relay Networks

This chapter presents an integrated framework that draws on previous research, evaluates, and exposes the performance of physical layer security (PHY-security) to ensure secure communication in the cooperative vehicular relay networks. In particular, we consider a cooperative vehicular network scenario wherein a moving source vehicle wants to share confidential information with a fixed destination infrastructure terminal via a moving amplify-and-forward relay vehicle in the presence of a moving passive eavesdropper vehicle. Consequently, we model the vehicle-to-vehicle links by a N-Rayleigh fading channel, whereas the vehicle-to-fixed link undergoes Rayleigh fading. Thereafter, under such realistic channel modeling, we evaluate the system secrecy performance in terms of secrecy outage probability, non-zero secrecy capacity, intercept probability, secrecy diversity order, and ergodic secrecy capacity. We show that the eavesdropper has a detrimental effect on the secrecy performance and it reduces the secrecy diversity order to zero. Finally, numerical and simulation results are provided to corroborate our analytical findings.