Secrecy Analysis of I/Q Imbalance with Hardware Impairments over Fox’s H-Fading channel

Impairments baseband model in-phase and quadrature-phase Imbalance (IQI) and Residual hardware impairments (RHI) are two key factors degrading the performance of wireless communication systems (WCS). In this paper, the joint effect of both IQI and RHI on the secrecy outage probability (SOP) of a WCS subject to Fox’s H-fading channel is investigated. Such a fading model generalizes most, if not all, of well-known fading and turbulence models. To this end, novel generalized closed-form expression is derived for the secrecy outage probability for all possible scenarios namely (i) Transmitter (Tx) only impaired, (ii) Receiver (Rx) only impaired, and (iii) both Tx and Rx are impaired. α−µ has been considered as a particular case of Fox’s H-fading distribution. The analytical derivations, revealed by simulation results, demonstrate that the RF impairments’ effects should be seriously taken into account in the design of secure next-generation wireless technologies. On the other hand, the numerical results show that the parameters of fading channels can be used as a key to mitigating the effects of RF impairments on the secrecy performance.