Secrecy Performance Analysis of Heterogeneous Networks With Unreliable Wireless Backhaul and Imperfect Channel Estimation

Wireless backhaul is an economical and flexible alternative to wired backhaul, however, it experiences impairments. This research proposes a new secure heterogeneous system model with unreliable wireless backhaul and imperfect channel estimation over Nakagami-m fading channel. To improve the system secrecy performance, we propose three small-cell transmitter selection schemes under channel estimation imperfections and wireless backhaul impairments, namely Optimum Selection (OS), Sub-optimum Selection (SS) and Minimum-Eavesdropping Selection (MES). Novel closed-form expressions of secrecy outage probability (SOP) are derived for these three selection schemes in both practical and ideal scenarios. The novel theoretical analysis and simulation results show the impact of wireless backhaul uncertainties and channel estimation errors on system secrecy performance. In addition, we investigate how the number of small-cell transmitters affects the system secrecy performance. The asymptotic behaviour is provided to obtain insights into the system performance. The analytical derivations and asymptotic expressions are validated by Monte Carlo simulations. Our novel theoretical analysis can guide different physical layer security (PLS) designs.