Physical Layer Security of Multiuser Satellite Communication Systems with Channel Estimation Error and Multiple Eavesdroppers

Abstract

This paper investigates the physical layer security (PLS) for the transmission of confidential information over satellite communication systems under unified framework. The generalized shadowed-Rician (SR) fading is utilized to model the satellite channel, and multiple legitimate users are served to cooperatively receive the broadcast signal with a cluster of unauthorized eavesdroppers. In particular, the channel estimation error (CEE) is considered for both the legitimate user and eavesdropping links. Based on the practical channel modeling, we derive the closed-form expressions for the probability of strictly positive secrecy capacity (PSPSC), secrecy outage probability (SOP), and average secrecy capacity (ASC) of the considered satellite communication system in the presence of imperfect channel estimation (ICE), which can provide efficient methods to evaluate the impacts of various propagation parameters on the secrecy performance. In order to obtain further insights into the key parameters on the secrecy performance at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), the asymptotic expressions of the SOP and ASC are also derived. Monte Carlo simulation results are provided to verify the correctness of our performance analysis.