Security Enhancement for Energy Harvesting Cognitive Networks with Relay Selection

Relay selection is proposed in this paper as an efficient solution to secure information transmission of secondary users against eavesdroppers in energy harvesting cognitive networks. The proposed relay selection method selects a secondary relay among available secondary relays, which are capable of harvesting radio frequency energy in signals of the secondary transmitter and correctly restore secondary message, to curtail signal-to-noise ratio at the wire-tapper. In order to evaluate the security performance of the suggested relay selection method, an exact intercept outage probability formula accounting for peak transmit power confinement, Rayleigh fading, and interference power confinement is firstly derived. Monte-Carlo simulations are then generated to corroborate the proposed formula. Numerous results expose that positions of relays, the number of relays, and parameters of the energy harvesting method significantly influence the security performance while the power confinements on secondary transmitters cause the performance saturation.