Outage performance of secure multicasting in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers

Recently, there has been a growing interest in applying multiple antennas to achieve information-theoretic security in wireless communication networks. In this paper, we consider the transmission of common confidential data from a single-antenna transmitter to multiple multi-antenna receivers in the presence of multiple multi-antenna eavesdroppers. Both the receivers and eavesdroppers employ maximal-ratio combining (MRC) to combine the signals received at multiple antennas. For the considered system, we derive its connection outage probability and secrecy outage probability to characterize the reliability level and the security level, respectively. Numerical results are also provided to analyze the tradeoff among the reliability and security performances and the number of antennas (or nodes) of either receivers or eavesdroppers.