Impact of Aperture Averaging and Antenna Correlation on the Secrecy Outage Performance over Mixed RF-FSO Cooperative System under Simultaneous RF and FSO Eavesdropping Attempts

The upcoming generations of communications demand high-speed data transfer while concentrating on a human-centric system that demands complete security of the transmitted data as well as the user. So, the focus of this research is on the security of a hybrid radio frequency (RF)-free-space optical (FSO) model with a decode-and-forward (DF) relay between the transmitter and the destination. The RF and FSO links are designed to follow the correlated η-μ and exponentiated Weibull fading distribution, respectively. Here, we consider simultaneous eavesdropping with eavesdroppers at both RF and FSO links trying to steal the transmitted data. Maximal ratio combining (MRC) receiver and selection combining (SC) receiver has been used in the RF links and the FSO links, respectively to improve the secrecy performance of the system. Using the well-known Meijer's-G function, the security of this proposed method is investigated by deriving closed-form formulas for secrecy outage probability and probability of non-zero secrecy capacity. Numerical results along with Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations are also provided to demonstrate the effects of simultaneous eavesdrop-ping, correlation, aperture averaging, fading parameters, etc. on the secrecy performance of the system.