Secrecy Rates in the Broadcast Channel with Confidential Messages and External Eavesdroppers

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the broadcast channel with confidential messages and external eavesdroppers (BCCE), where a multi-antenna base station simultaneously communicates to multiple potentially malicious users, in the presence of randomly located external eavesdroppers. Using the proposed model, we study the secrecy rates achievable by regularized channel inversion (RCI) precoding by performing a large-system analysis that combines tools from stochastic geometry and random matrix theory. We obtain explicit expressions for the probability of secrecy outage and an upper bound on the rate loss due to the presence of external eavesdroppers. We show that both these quantities scale as $\frac{\lambda_e}{\sqrt{N}}$, where $N$ is the number of transmit antennas and $\lambda_e$ is the density of external eavesdroppers, irrespective of their collusion strategy. Furthermore, we derive a practical rule for the choice of the regularization parameter, which is agnostic of channel state information and location of eavesdroppers, and yet provides close to optimal performance.