Secrecy Outage Analysis of Multiuser Downlink Wiretap Networks With Potential Eavesdroppers

Abstract

We investigate the secrecy outage probability (SOP) of a downlink wiretap network consisting of a single legitimate base station (BS), multiple legitimate mobile stations (MSs), and multiple potential eavesdroppers (EVEs), where each EVE randomly attempts to overhear the data transmission with a certain probability. In particular, we consider an opportunistic feedback (OF) strategy in which each legitimate MS feeds their channel gain back to the BS for data reception only when its gain is greater than a certain threshold. We analyze a closed-form expression of the SOP under this strategy. As our main result, we demonstrate that the SOP of the OF strategy approaches that of the full feedback strategy as the number of legitimate MSs becomes large. It is worth noting that, for the first time, we mathematically characterize the SOP in this practical wiretap network setting having multiple potential EVEs.