Secrecy Outage Performance for Dual-Hop Underlay Cognitive Radio System over Nakagami-m Fading

In this paper, the security performance of a dual-hop underlay cognitive radio (CR) system is investigated. In this system, we consider that the transmitted information by a source node S is forwarded by a multi-antenna relay R to its intended destination D. The relay performs the maximal-ratio combining (MRC) technique to process the multiple copies of the received signal. We also consider the presence of an eavesdropper who is attempting to intercept the transmitted information at both communication links, (i.e, S-R and R-D). In underlay cognitive radio networks (CRN), the source and the relay are required to adjust their transmission power to avoid causing interference to the primary user. Under this constraint, a closed-form expression of the secrecy outage probability is derived subject to Nakagami-m fading model. The derived expression is validated using Monte-Carlo simulation for various values of fading severity parameters as well as the number of MRC branches.