Secrecy Performance of Multi-Antenna Satellite-Terrestrial Relay Networks with Jamming in the Presence of Spatial Eavesdroppers

This work investigates the physical layer secrecy of a multi-antenna hybrid satellite-terrestrial relay networks (HSTRN) with jamming, in which a satellite aims to make communication with a destination user by means of a relay, along with spatially random eavesdroppers. In order to weaken the signals of eavesdroppers, the conventional relay can also generate intentional interference, besides forwarding the received signal. Shadowed-Rician fading is adopted in satellite link, while Rayleigh fading is adopted in terrestrial link, eavesdropper link and jamming link. The analytical and asymptotic formulas for the system secrecy outage probability (SOP) are characterized. Practical insights on the diversity order of the network are revealed according to the asymptotic behavior of SOP at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Then, analysis of the system throughput is examined to assess the secrecy performance. In the end, numerical simulation results are presented to validate the theoretical analysis and point out: (1) The secrecy performance of the considered network is affected by the channel fading scenario, the system configuration; (2) Decrease of the relay coverage airspace can provide better SOP performance; (3) Jamming from the relay can improve secrecy performance without additional network resources.