Impact of secrecy on capacity in large-scale wireless networks

Since wireless channel is vulnerable to eavesdroppers, the secrecy during message delivery is a major concern in many applications such as commercial, governmental and military networks. This paper investigates information-theoretic secrecy in large-scale networks and studies how capacity is affected by the secrecy constraint where the locations and channel state information (CSI) of eavesdroppers are both unknown. We consider two scenarios: 1) non-colluding case where eavesdroppers can only decode messages individually; and 2) colluding case where eavesdroppers can collude to decode a message. For the non-colluding case, we show that the network secrecy capacity is not affected in order-sense by the presence of eavesdroppers. For the colluding case, the per-node secrecy capacity of Θ(1/√n) can be achieved when the eavesdropper density ψ_e(n) is O(n^-β), for any constant β >; 0 and decreases monotonously as the density of eavesdroppers increases. The upper bounds on network secrecy capacity are derived for both cases and shown to be achievable by our scheme when ψ_e(n) = O(n^-β) or ψ_e(n) = Ω(log α-2/α n), where α is the path loss gain. We show that there is a clear tradeoff between the security constraints and the achievable capacity.