Secure Transmission for Energy Efficient Parallel Mixed FSO/RF System in Presence of Independent Eavesdroppers

In this paper, the physical layer security (PLS) challenges for a decode and forward (DF) based dual hop mixed free space optical (FSO) / radio frequency (RF) communication system in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers has been investigated. In order to improve the PLS of the energy efficient co-operative communication system, diversity combining techniques have been introduced at the destination node. In addition to this, collusion and non collusion eavesdropper scenarios are considered to make the system more practical. The FSO and RF links are assumed to experience independent Málaga ($\mathcal {M}$) and Nakagami-$m$ fading distributions, respectively. Additionally, the FSO link model considers the impact of boresigt and non-zero boresight pointing errors and type of optical demodulation scheme. To investigate the security performance, the lower bound for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and effective secrecy throughput (EST) have been obtained in terms of Meijer’s G function. Thereafter, asymptotic expressions have been derived for the considered system and the numerical results have been verified by the Monte-Carlo simulation method. Finally, we have analyzed the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) based on secrecy rate ($R_s$) of the considered system to provide practical insights into the effect of major parameters on the energy efficient secure transmission design.