Secure transmission enhancement in shotgun cellular systems using transmitter-side information over correlated shadowing channels

Shotgun cellular systems (SCSs) are stochastic models of wireless networks where base stations (BSs) are randomly deployed across spatial settings of dimension one, two, or three, under a Poisson point process (PPP). As the physical layer security (PLS) of SCSs depends on BS density—which is influenced by the network’s setup and deployment—and typically underperforms compared to ideal hexagonal cellular systems (HCSs), this paper proposes an enhancement of PLS—including average secrecy capacity (ASC), secrecy outage probability (SOP), and the probability of non-zero secrecy capacity (PNZSC)—by leveraging side information (SI) available at the transmitter in addition to the source message for Wyner’s three-node model under realistic conditions, where shadowing coefficients of the channels are arbitrarily correlated. Modeling the shadowing on both the main (transmitter–legitimate receiver) and eavesdropper (transmitter–eavesdropper) channels with a lognormal (LN) distribution—the standard and most accurate model for characterizing shadowing—yields closed-form expressions for the aforementioned PLS performance metrics, thereby providing rigorous analytical insights. Lastly, the correctness of the analytical findings is confirmed via Monte Carlo (MC) simulation experiments.