On the Equivalence between Interference and Eavesdropping in Wireless Communications

TL;DR

This paper reveals a fundamental mathematical equivalence between interference analysis in cellular systems and security analysis in wireless communications, enabling unified approaches and new insights for both problems.

Contribution

It establishes a novel equivalence between interference outage probability and secrecy rate analysis, allowing cross-application of methods and results.

Findings

Unified approach for interference and security analysis

New results for secrecy outage probability in fading channels

Demonstration of the equivalence's applicability to various scenarios

Abstract

We show that the problem of analyzing the outage probability in cellular systems affected by co-channel interference and background noise is mathematically equivalent to the problem of analyzing the wireless information-theoretic security in terms of the maximum secrecy rate in fading channels. Hence, these both apparently unrelated problems can be addressed by using a common approach. We illustrate the applicability of the connection unveiled herein to provide new results for the secrecy outage probability in different scenarios.