Enhanced physical layer security for cognitive radio systems through joint spectrum access and power allocation

Physical layer (PHY) security is an important issue in wireless communication systems. In this study, the authors investigate the interactions between the PHY security performance and the spectrum access technique in a cooperative cognitive radio (CR) network. In the classical spectrum access, if the measured energy on a given subchannel is less than a threshold, the subband is dedicated for CR transmission. Here, they consider a probabilistic spectrum access (PSA), which assigns to each primary subchannel a probability which is determined according to the measured energy on that subchannel. In addition, both spectrum access and CR power allocation are performed simultaneously. They formulate the general outage probability and some important PHY security performance metrics, such as average secrecy rate, secrecy outage probability, and probability of positive secrecy rate in terms of the spectrum access and optimal power allocation functions. The authors' numerical analysis indicates that the PSA method achieves a superior PHY security and outage performance compared to the classical threshold-based spectrum sensing and power allocation method.