Abstract: | This work investigates secure cluster‐aided multi‐hop randomize‐and‐forward networks. We present a hop‐by‐hop multi‐hop transmission scheme with relay selection, which evaluates for each cluster the relays that can securely receive the message. We propose an analytical model to derive the secure connectivity probability (SCP) of the hop‐by‐hop transmission scheme. For comparison, we also analyze SCPs of traditional end‐to‐end transmission schemes with two relay‐selection policies. We perform simulations, and our analytical results verify that the proposed hop‐by‐hop scheme is superior to end‐to‐end schemes, especially with a large number of hops or high eavesdropper channel quality. Numerical results also show that the proposed hop‐by‐hop scheme achieves near‐optimal performance in terms of the SCP. |