Physical Layer Security in Cognitive Vehicular Networks

In contrast with the traditional cryptography, physical layer security has attracted the attention of many researchers having aim at reinforcing the security of communication systems. As far as vehicular communication is concerned, it is challenging to maintain secure and reliable communication between the connected vehicles due to the density, mobility, and dynamic network topology. This paper considers a vehicle to infrastructure communication in which a legitimately fixed transmitter equipped with a single antenna transmits a confidential message to a legitimate mobile receiver equipped with multiple antennas in the presence of a passive mobile eavesdropper. In such a single input multiple output wireless system, the receiver performs the maximal ratio combining technique assuming constant vehicle speed. We assume that the antennas are closely spaced and depending upon the imperfect channel state information (CSI), we derive the closed-form expressions for the average outage probability, secrecy outage probability, and average secrecy outage rate over the uniform, exponential, and arbitrary correlated Nakagami-m channels for dual antenna branches. In order to gain insight we also perform the high SNR asymptotic analysis of the outage probability and secrecy outage probability. Simulations are conducted to validate the accuracy of our derived analytic expressions. The computation error analysis is carried out to provide the suitability of the correlation type at the legitimate receiver side. Our findings suggest that the performance of the case with exponential channel correlation is better than those for the uniform and arbitrary. Numerical results show the joint effect of vehicle mobility and the antenna correlation on secrecy performance. Moreover, we also observed that the imperfect knowledge of the CSI degrades the security of the confidential messages severely under the effect of mobility.