Physical layer security in cellular networks: a stochastic geometry approach

This paper studies the information-theoretic secrecy performance in large-scale cellular networks based on a stochastic geometry framework. The locations of both base stations and mobile users are modeled as independent two-dimensional Poisson point processes. We consider two important features of cellular networks, namely, information exchange between base stations and cell association, to characterize their impact on the achievable secrecy rate of an arbitrary downlink transmission with a certain portion of the mobile users acting as potential eavesdroppers. In particular, tractable results are presented under diverse assumptions on the availability of eavesdroppers' location information at the serving base station, which captures the benefit from the exchange of the location information between base stations.This work was supported by National ICT Australia (NICTA), and the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (Project No. DP110102548 and DP130101760). NICTA is funded by the Australian Government as represented by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and the Australian Research Council through the ICT Centre of Excellence program