Physical Layer Security in the Presence of Interference

Abstract: We evaluate and quantify the joint effect of fading and multiple interferers on the physical-layer (PHY) security of a system consisted of a base-station (BS), a legitimate user, and an eavesdropper. To this end, we present a novel closed-form expression for the secrecy outage probability, which takes into account the fading characteristics of the wireless environment, the location and the number of interferers, as well as the transmission power of the BS and the interference. The results reveal that the impact of interference should be seriously taken into account in the design and deployment of a wireless system with PHY security.