Optimal Power Allocation for Achieving Secure Green Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

In cognitive radio networks, wireless nodes adapt to the surrounding radio environment and utilize the spectrum of licensed users. The cognitive radio environment is dynamic, and wireless channels are accessible by both legitimate and illegitimate users. Therefore, maintaining the security of cognitive radio networks is a challenging task, which must be addressed thoroughly. Further, with the recent exponential surge in wireless nodes and associated high data rate requirements, energy consumption is also growing at an unprecedented rate. Hence, energy efficiency becomes an important metric that must be considered in the design of future wireless networks. Accordingly, by considering the great ecological and economic benefits of green wireless networks, this work focus on energy-efficient resource allocation in secure cognitive radio networks. Since physical-layer security is an emerging technique that improves the security of communication devices, in this paper, an ergodic secure energy efficiency problem for a cognitive radio network is formulated with a primary user, a secondary user, and an eavesdropper. As the formulated problem is non-convex, a concave lower bound is applied to transform the original non-convex problem into a convex one. Further, by adopting the fractional programming and dual decomposition techniques, optimal power allocation strategies are obtained with the aim of maximizing the ergodic secure energy efficiency of the secondary user with constraints on the average interference power and average transmit power. Numerical examples are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.