Physical layer security in mixed Rf/FSO system under multiple eavesdroppers collusion and non-collusion

Secure transmission in wireless networks is a big critical issue due to the broadcast nature of the wireless propagation environment. In this paper, the physical layer security performance in a mixed radio frequency (RF)/free space optical (FSO) system under multiple eavesdroppers is investigated. The RF links and FSO link within the system are assumed to respectively undergo Nakagami-m and Gamma–Gamma fading distributions. The two practical eavesdroppers scenarios considered includes: Colluding and Non-colluding in which their channel state information is unavailable at the source. The closed-form expressions for the lower bound security outage probability and the strictly positive secrecy capacity under both scenarios are derived by utilizing the system end-to-end cumulative distribution function and eavesdroppers’ probability density function. The results show that the increase in the number of eavesdroppers under both scenarios profoundly degrades the system secrecy performance. Moreover, it is demonstrated that both the atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors affect the concerned system secrecy and the impact of RF fading parameters is also presented. The accuracy of the numerical results obtained is validated by Montel-Carol simulations.