Physical layer security in shotgun cellular systems over correlated/independent shadow fading channels

Abstract

The shotgun cellular systems (SCSs) (modeling, generally, a dense cellular or wireless data network deployment and non-ideal regular hexagonal grid with site-acquisition difficulties, variable traffic load) are wireless communication systems with randomly placed base stations (BSs) over the entire plane according to a stochastic (e.g., Poisson) point process in n dimensions (n = 1, 2, and 3). Due to the good performance and the importance of the SCSs in today’s communications, the physical layer security of these systems is practically of importance, specifically, in more realistic channel propagation models. In this paper, by assuming that the channel coefficients are known at the receiver, we analyze the performance of the physical layer security for the classic Wyner’s three-node model in the SCSs over correlated/independent log-normal shadow fading channels. For this purpose, first, we calculate the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) performance at a mobile station (MS) in an SCS. Then, the average secrecy capacity (ASC), the probability of non-zero secrecy capacity (PNSC), the secure outage probability (SOP), and the lower bound of SOP (LSOP) are obtained, and also, their approximated closed-form expressions are derived. Finally, analytical results are validated numerically.