On the Equivalence between Interference and Eavesdropping in Wireless Communications

We show that the problem of analyzing the outage probability in cellular systems affected by co-channel interference and background noise is mathematically equivalent to the problem of analyzing the wireless information-theoretic security in terms of the maximum secrecy rate in fading channels. Hence, these both apparently unrelated problems can be addressed by using a common approach. We illustrate the applicability of the connection unveiled herein to provide new results for the secrecy outage probability in different scenarios.