Closed-Form Secrecy Outage Analysis of Cellular Downlink Systems in the Presence of Co-Channel Interference

This paper analyzes the secrecy outage probability of a cellular downlink system which consists of multiple users, one base station (BS), and one eavesdropper in the presence of co-channel interferers, where the BS transmits its signals to users which are distributed according to a Poisson point process with a fixed density, while the eavesdropper attempts to tap the transmission from the BS to the users. To enhance the transmission security against eavesdropping, we propose two multiuser scheduling schemes, namely, the partial channel state information (CSI) aided user scheduling (PCSI-US) scheme where only the CSIs of users are available without knowing the co-channel interferers’ CSIs and the full CSI aided user scheduling (FCSI-US) scheme which requires the CSIs of both users and interferers. For comparison purposes, the conventional round-robin scheduling scheme is also considered as a baseline. We derive closed-form expressions of the secrecy outage probability for the proposed PCSI-US and FCSI-US as well as conventional round-robin scheduling schemes in co-channel interference (CCI) environments. Numerical results show that the proposed FCSI-US and PCSI-US schemes outperform the conventional round-robin scheduling in terms of their secrecy outage probabilities, where FCSI-US achieves the best secrecy outage performance in CCI environments. It is also demonstrated that increasing the mean number of users has a marginal effect on the secrecy performance of conventional round-robin scheduling, which can significantly decrease the secrecy outage probabilities of PCSI-US and FCSI-US schemes. This further validates the secrecy effectiveness of the proposed user scheduling methods in terms of combating the CCI.