Secrecy performance of transmit antenna selection for underlay MIMO cognitive radio relay networks with energy harvesting

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, the secrecy performance in a MIMO cognitive radio (CR) relay network with energy harvesting (EH) and transmit antenna selection/maximal ratio combining (TAS/MRC) is invstigated, where the DF relaying protocol and multiple colluding passive eavesdroppers are considered. To improve the security of wireless transmission, two antenna selection schemes are proposed, namely, the optimal transmit antenna selection (OTAS) scheme and suboptimal transmit antenna selection (STAS) scheme. For the purpose of comparison, the space‐time transmission (STT) scheme is introduced as a baseline. The exact and asymptotic closed‐form secrecy outage probability (SOP) expressions for OTAS, STAS and STT schemes are derived over Rayleigh fading channels. An extension of the TAS framework to an artificial noise (AN) aided MIMO network is further presented and an AN aided transmit antenna selection (AN‐TAS) scheme is proposed, in which the unselected antennas at R are used to emit AN for interfering with Es. Numerical results show that the OTAS and STAS schemes perform better than STT scheme in terms of SOP. Meanwhile, the SOP of AN‐TAS scheme is much smaller than that of OTAS, STAS and STT schemes in the high SNR region, indicating the benefit of applying AN in MIMO network.