Bounds on the Secrecy Outage Probability for Dependent Fading Channels

Abstract

The amount of sensitive data, which is transmitted wirelessly will increase with future technologies. This raises many questions about secure data transmission. Besides cryptography, information-theoretic security gained increasing attention over the recent years. Among others, it deals with the problem of secure data transmission on the physical layer to a legitimate receiver (Bob) in the presence of an eavesdropper (Eve). In this work, we investigate upper and lower bounds on the secrecy outage probability for slowly-fading wiretap channels with an arbitrary dependency structure between the fading channels to Bob and Eve. Both cases of absence of channel-state information at the transmitter (CSI-T) and availability of CSI-T of only the main channel to the legitimate receiver are considered. Furthermore, we derive explicit expressions for the upper and lower bounds for Rayleigh fading and compare them to the case of independent channels. The joint distribution of the legitimate and eavesdropper channels has a tremendous impact on the achievable secrecy outage probability. The bounds enable developing guaranteed secrecy schemes by only measuring the marginal channel distributions.