Performance analysis of secure communications over correlated slow‐fading additive white Gaussian noise channels

Summary The broadcast nature of communications in wireless communication networks makes it vulnerable to some attacks, particularly eavesdrop attack. Hence, information security can have a key role to protect privacy and avoid identity theft in these networks, especially in distributed networks. In the wireless systems, the signal propagation is affected by path loss, slow fading (shadowing), and fast fading (multi‐path fading). As we know, there is a correlation between communication channels in the real radio environments. This correlation is defined by the correlation between their shadowing and/or multipath fading factors. So when there are several channels in the wireless systems, there is certainly a correlation between the channels. In this paper, we assume that the transmitter knows the full channel state information (CSI), it means the transmitter knows both the channel gains of the illegitimate (ie, eavesdropper) and the legitimate receivers and study the performance of secure communications of single‐input single‐output (SISO) systems consisting of single antenna devices, in the presence of a single antenna passive eavesdropper over correlated slow fading channels, where the main (transmitter to legitimate receiver) and eavesdropper (transmitter to illegitimate receiver) channels are correlated. Finally, we present numerical results and verify the accuracy of our analysis by Monte‐Carlo simulations.