Opportunistic Relaying Against Eavesdropping for Internet-of-Things: A Security-Reliability Tradeoff Perspective

This paper investigates the physical-layer security (PLS) of wireless transmissions with the aid of multiple decode-and-forward one-way relays in the presence of both eavesdropping attacks and channel estimation errors (CEEs). To protect wireless transmission with CEE, two opportunistic relaying schemes are conceived to upgrade the PLS of the wireless communications with the aid of relays, namely, the CEE-oriented pure relay selection (CEE-PRS) and CEE-oriented jammer-aided relay selection (CEE-JRS), respectively. Moreover, the security-reliability tradeoff (SRT) is designed due to that increasing the transmit power may enhance the reliability, but the security may be sacrificed concurrently, where the security and reliability are characterized by the intercept probability (IP) and outage probability (OP), respectively. We then analyze the IP and OP of the CEE-PRS and CEE-JRS schemes. Furthermore, both the CEE-oriented direct transmission (CEE-DT) and the perfect channel estimation-oriented direct transmission (PCE-DT) schemes are also analyzed for comparison purposes. It is shown that although the SRT of the wireless communications can indeed be degraded by the eavesdropping attacks in low CEE regions, the proposed CEE-PRS and CEE-JRS schemes are capable of significant improving the SRT performance of wireless communications, demonstrating the advantage of the proposed CEE-PRS and CEE-JRS schemes against eavesdropping.