Secrecy Outage Analysis of Relay-User Pairing for Secure Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Networks

In this paper, we study the physical-layer security of a hybrid satellite-terrestrial network composed of a satellite, multiple terrestrial decode-and-forward (DF) relays and users in the presence of a terrestrial eavesdropper who attempts to tap legitimate information from both satellite and relays. We consider two different scenarios: I) the channel state information (CSI) of wiretap links is known, and II) the CSI of wiretap links is unknown. Accordingly, optimal and suboptimal relay-user pairing schemes are proposed for the aforementioned two scenarios, respectively. Specifically, a relay-user pair maximizing the secrecy rate is chosen as the optimal one to participate in the transmission, where all links’ CSI is used to perform relay-user pairing. However, suboptimal relay-user pairing scheme is designed only relying on the main links’ CSI without requiring wiretap links’ CSI, where a relay-user pair with the maximal transmission rate of main link is selected. Also, closed-form expressions of secrecy outage probability with both integer and rational fading severity parameter are derived in the case of satellite links undergo Shadowed-Rician fading and terrestrial links subject to Rayleigh fading. Furthermore, asymptotic secrecy outage probability analysis is conducted in the high signal-to-noise ratio region. Numerical results reveal that relay-user pairing is beneficial to further improve physical-layer security of the hybrid satellite-terrestrial network.