Performance evaluation of multi-hop cooperative transmission protocol with hardware noises and presence of eavesdropper

In this paper, we propose a simple multi-hop cooperative transmission protocol (MCT) to decrease outage probability for multi-hop networks under impact of hardware impairments and presence of an eavesdropper. In the proposed method, the source and intermediate relays adjust their transmit power so that the eavesdropper cannot overhear the transmitted data. We derive exact closed-form expressions of outage probability (OP) and the average number of time slots (TS) used to relay the data from the source to the destination for the MCT protocol over Rayleigh fading channel. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to verify the theoretical derivations. Results show that the proposed protocol outperforms multi-hop direct transmission one (MDT), in terms of the average OP and TS.