Energy-Aware Relay Selection Improves Security-Reliability Tradeoff in Energy Harvesting Cooperative Cognitive Radio Systems

This article investigates the physical layer security for a cooperative cognitive radio (CCR) system with energy-harvesting (EH) technique, which consists of a cognitive source (CS), multiple cognitive relays (CRs) and a cognitive destination (CD) as well as multiple eavesdroppers (Es) who are considered to tap the confidential transmission from CS via CRs to CD. Both CS and CRs are equipped with energy-harvesters to harvest energy from the surrounding radio frequency environment. Additionally, in order to guarantee the quality-of-service of primary communications, the transmit powers of CS and CRs are limited by the maximum tolerant power at primary destination. Depending on the availability of channel state information (CSI) of wireless energy links from primary transmitter (PT) to CRs, we respectively propose non-energy aware relay selection (NEARS) and energy aware relay selection (EARS) schemes for protecting the transmission from CS via CRs to CD from leaking to Es. We consider the use of the security-reliability tradeoff (SRT) to measure the performance of NEARS and EARS schemes. For the purpose of comparison, we also carry out the analysis of SRT performance for conventional direct communication (DC). Furthermore, the closed-form expressions of outage probability and intercept probability for NEARS and EARS schemes are derived and numerical results show that the SRT performance of EARS is better than that of DC and NEARS schemes.