Secrecy rates in broadcast channels with confidential messages and external eavesdroppers

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 with regularized channel inversion (RCI) precoding by performing a large-system analysis that combines results from stochastic geometry and random matrix theory, where the number of users K and the number of transmit antennas N both grow to infinity in a fixed ratio. 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 λ_e/√N as the density of external eavesdroppers λ_e grows, 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.