  This article examines the secrecy coding aided wireless communications from a
source to a destination in the presence of an eavesdropper from a
security-reliability tradeoff (SRT) perspective. Explicitly, the security is
quantified in terms of the intercept probability experienced at the
eavesdropper, while the outage probability encountered at the destination is
used to measure the transmission reliability. We characterize the SRT of
conventional direct transmission from the source to the destination and show
that if the outage probability is increased, the intercept probability
decreases, and vice versa. We first demonstrate that the employment of relay
nodes for assisting the source-destination transmissions is capable of
defending against eavesdropping, followed by quantifying the benefits of
single-relay selection (SRS) as well as of multi-relay selection (MRS) schemes.
More specifically, in the SRS scheme, only the single "best" relay is selected
for forwarding the source signal to the destination, whereas the MRS scheme
allows multiple relays to participate in this process. It is illustrated that
both the SRS and MRS schemes achieve a better SRT than the conventional direct
transmission, especially upon increasing the number of relays. Numerical
results also show that as expected, the MRS outperforms the SRS in terms of its
SRT. Additionally, we present some open challenges and future directions for
the wireless relay aided physical-layer security.
