Security and Reliability Performance Analysis for Cloud Radio Access Networks With Channel Estimation Errors

Physical layer (PHY) security is recently regarded as a promising technique to improve the security performance of wireless communication networks. Current developments in PHY security are often based on the assumption of perfect channel state information (CSI). In this paper, both security and reliability performance for the downlink cloud radio access network with optimal remote radio heads (RRHs) node selection are investigated in a practical scenario by considering channel estimation (CE) errors. In particular, a three-phase transmission scheme is proposed and the linear minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estimation method is utilized to obtain the CSI. Based on the CSI estimates and the statistics of CE errors, the outage probability and intercept probability are derived in closed-form expression to evaluate the security and reliability performance, respectively. In addition, two possible cases (with or without intercepting signals from baseband unit) are considered for the eavesdropper. It is found that the suggested optimal RRHs selection scheme outperforms the nonselection scheme, and that the increasing number of RRHs can lower the outage probability as well as the intercept probability. It is also shown that there exists an optimal training number to minimize the sum of the outage probability and intercept probability. Finally, simulation results are provided to corroborate our proposed studies.