Secrecy outage in correlated Nakagami-m fading channels

Abstract

Correlation between the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper has been seldom considered in the literature when evaluating secrecy metrics in stochastic wireless networks. In practice, however, poor scattering conditions may lead to spatially correlated channels, which can be exploited by eavesdroppers. In this paper we investigate the connection outage and secrecy outage in Poisson-distributed random networks under Nakagami-m fading and mutually correlated legitimate and eavesdropping channels. Numerical results show that correlated fading has an important effect on security, which may be either beneficial or harmful, depending on the secrecy outage constraints.