Secure Secondary Communications with Curious Primary Users in Cognitive Underlay Networks

Abstract

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In the underlay cognitive radio network, the secondary users are allowed to transmit concurrently with the primary users , which shows great potential to relieve the spectrum scarcity problem. However, it raises significant security issues at the physical layer due to the spectrum sharing approach. Different from most present research, in this paper we study the secure communication problem between secondary users where the primary receiver is a curious passive adversary, i.e., an eavesdropper. Specifically, we consider the worst but common case where the primary receiver can decode the messages from its primary transmitter successfully before trying to decode secondary user's confidential messages. To protect these messages from being eavesdropped, we employ a fullduplex secondary receiver who can broadcast jamming signals to degrade eavesdropper's channel quality while guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS) for primary transmission. Following this framework, we formulate a secrecy capacity maximization problem and obtain the optimal power allocation scheme to allocate power between the secondary transmitter and the fullduplex secondary receiver. Simulations are presented to show the superiority of the optimal scheme over baseline algorithms.