Effects of Channel Correlation on Outage Secrecy Capacity

Abstract

We consider the transmission of confidential data over a wireless quasi-static fading wiretap channel when the main and eavesdropper channels are correlated there. Under the assumption that before transmission the transmitter only knows the channel state information (CSI) of the main channel but has no idea about the CSI of the eavesdropper channel, we derive the asymptotic outage probability and also asymptotic outage secrecy capacity as the transmission power goes to infinity, which cover the corresponding results when the main and eavesdropper channels are independent as special cases. Based on the theoretical results, the effects of channel correlation on the asymptotic outage probability and asymptotic outage secrecy capacity are explored. Remarkably, our results reveal that the correlation between the main and eavesdropper channels has a significant impact on both the asymptotic outage probability and asymptotic outage secrecy capacity and that such an impact can be helpful or harmful depending on the relative channel condition between the main and eavesdropper channels.