Security Analysis of Forward Error Correction Codes in Relay Aided Networks

Network security and data confidentiality of transmitted information are among the non-functional requirements of industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) in addition to latency, reliability and energy efficiency requirements. Physical layer security techniques are promising solutions to assist cryptographic methods in the presence of an eavesdropper in IWSN setups. In this paper, we propose a physical layer security scheme, which is based on both insertion of an random error vector to forward error correction (FEC) codewords and transmission over decentralized relay nodes. Reed-Solomon and Golay codes are selected as FEC coding schemes and the security performance of the proposed model is evaluated with the aid of decoding error probability of an eavesdropper. The results show that security level is highly based on the location of the eavesdropper and secure communication can be achieved when some of channels between eavesdropper and relay nodes are significantly noisier.