Secure transmission in the random cognitive radio networks with secrecy guard zone and artificial noise

The authors study the secure transmission design in random cognitive radio networks where the primary users, the secondary users and the eavesdroppers are randomly distributed according to Poisson point processes. Centring on this scenario, the authors propose a simple and decentralised secure transmission scheme by jointly incorporating the secrecy guard zone and artificial noise. In particular, this transmission scheme helps to enhance secrecy performance via differentiating between secondary transmitters in accordance with the eavesdropping environment. They then analyse the connection outage and secrecy outage performance of the secondary network, based on which they obtain the closed-form expression of the secrecy throughput. They further determine the optimal transmission power of the secondary transmitters and the optimal power allocation between the information-bearing signal and artificial noise to maximise the secrecy throughput of the secondary network under primary and secondary outage constraints. The authors’ analysis highlights that introducing secrecy guard zone provides better security performance, and artificial noise performs as additional interference to insert a control between the reliability and security. Numerical results show how the system parameters affect the achievable maximum secrecy throughput, the optimal transmission power and the optimal power allocation between the information-bearing signal and the artificial noise.