Secrecy outage analysis of multi-user multi-eavesdropper cellular networks in the face of cochannel interference

This paper studies the physical-layer security of a multi-user multi-eavesdropper cellular network, which is composed of multiple users communicating with a base station while the eavesdroppers may intercept the communications from users to the base station (BS). The cellular network is a time-slotted system with simultaneously transmission, in each time slot, a single user is scheduled to transmit messages to BS while the remaining users opportunistically receive information. Considering multiple users available in the cellular network, we present three multi-user scheduling schemes, namely the round-robin scheduling scheme as well as the suboptimal and optimal user scheduling schemes to improve the security of communication (from users to BS) against eavesdropping attacks. We only need to assume that the channel state information (CSI) of the main link spanning from users to BS is known in the suboptimal scheduling. On the contrary, the optimal scheduling is designed by assuming that the CSI of the main link and wiretap link (spanning from users to the eavesdropper) are available. We further carry out secrecy diversity analysis and show that the round-robin always achieves only one diversity order, whereas the suboptimal and optimal user scheduling schemes achieve the full diversity. In addition, numerical results illustrate that the optimal scheduling performs the best and the round-robin has the worst performance in terms of the secrecy outage probability. Last, as the number of users increases, the secrecy outage probabilities of the suboptimal and optimal scheduling schemes decrease significantly.