Opportunistic Relaying in Multicasting over Generalized Shadowed Fading Channels: A PHY Security Analysis

The secrecy of wireless multicast networks is greatly hampered due to the simultaneous presence of fading and shadowing, which can be enhanced using random attributes of the propagation medium. This work focuses on utilizing those attributes to enhance the physical layer security (PHY security) performance of a dual-hop wireless multicast network over kappa-mu shadowed fading channel under the wiretapping attempts of multiple eavesdroppers. In order to raise the secrecy level, we employ multiple relays with the best relay selection strategy. Performance analysis has been carried out based on the mathematical modeling in terms of closed-form expressions of the probability of non-zero secrecy multicast capacity, secure outage probability for multicasting, and ergodic secrecy multicast capacity. Capitalizing on those expressions, we analyze how the system parameters (i.e. fading, shadowing, the number of antennas, destination receivers, eavesdroppers, and relays) affect the secrecy performance. Our numerical results show that the detrimental impacts due to fading and shadowing can be remarkably mitigated using the well-known opportunistic relaying technique. Moreover, the proposed model unifies secrecy analysis of several classical models, thereby exhibits enormous versatility than the existing works. Finally, all the numerical results are authenticated utilizing Monte-Carlo simulations.