Secrecy Trade-off at the Physical Layer over Mixed Fading Multicast Channels Employing Antenna Diversity

This paper deals with the secrecy performance analysis of a multicast network over mixed fading scenarios in which a cluster of passive eavesdroppers is trying to overhear the secret transmission. Our key contribution is to prevent this malicious attack of the illegitimate receivers. Rayleigh/ Rician mixed fading channels are considered to model alternately the multicast/ eavesdropper and eavesdropper/ multicast channels as such mixed fading scenarios are often encountered in cellular communication where only one link (either multicast or eavesdropper) undergo a line-of-sight propagation path. At first, we derive the probability density functions for the single-input-multiple-output multicast scenarios and then the secrecy analysis is carried out by obtaining closed-form expressions for the performance matrices such as the probability of non-zero secrecy multicast capacity, ergodic secrecy multicast capacity, and secure outage probability for multicasting. The derived expressions are beneficial to investigate how the antenna diversity can combat the detrimental impact of fading as well as the number of multicast users and eavesdroppers, and improve the secrecy level to the acceptable limit. Moreover, the best secure scenario in terms of the secrecy parameters is obtained when the multicast channels undergo Rician fading whereas the eavesdropper channels experience Rayleigh fading. Finally, the analytical expressions are justified via the Monte-Carlo simulations.