Cooperative Spectrum Access Towards Secure Information Transfer for CRNs

In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), secure information transfer is of paramount importance for primary users (PUs), while secondary users (SUs) mainly desire to ease the starvation for transmission opportunities. To meet such different requirements, cooperation between PUs and SUs can be leveraged and therefore create a win-win situation. In this paper, we investigate cooperative spectrum access for CRNs, which targets to improve the secure transmission of PUs via cooperating SUs that would be incented by certain transmission opportunities. Two types of cooperation schemes are proposed, whereby the PU either cooperates with two individual SUs or a cluster of SUs, which are referred to as relay-jammer (R-J) scheme and cluster-beamforming (C-B) scheme, respectively. In R-J scheme, two individual SUs act as a relay and a friendly jammer to improve the PU´s secrecy; In return, the PU allocates a fraction of access time for the SUs´ transmission. To achieve the maximum secrecy rate, joint time and power allocation is considered. Particularly, the cooperating relay and jammer determine the optimal transmission power, while the PU decides the optimal time allocation strategy. In C-B scheme, the PU cooperates with a cluster of SUs to enhance the secrecy of the primary link via collaborative beamforming, where three different approaches are proposed for the scenarios with one eavesdropper, with multiple eavesdroppers, and without eavesdroppers´ information, respectively. To maximize the secrecy rate, the weight selection and time allocation are also studied. Simulation results are given to validate the proposed schemes and demonstrate that the PU can significantly enhance the secrecy through cooperation.