Secrecy outage probability analysis of energy-aware relay selection for energy-harvesting cooperative systems

The secrecy outage performance for a cooperative cognitive radio energy-harvesting network is analyzed. The cognitive network is composed of an energy-constrained cognitive source (CS), multiple energy-constrained cognitive relays (CRs) and a cognitive destination (CD) as well as an eavesdropper (E) coexists with a primary network consisting of a primary transmitter (PT) and a primary receiver (PR). The CS and CRs are equipped with energy harvesters for collecting energy from the radio frequency signal from PT and their transmit powers are limited by the interference threshold at PR. To prevent confidential information leaking to E, an optimal relay selection (ORS) scheme and a suboptimal relay selection (SRS) scheme are proposed. In ORS scheme, the whole channels state information (CSI) of wireless links is available to CRs while SRS only needs to know the CSI of main channels from CRs to CD. Moreover, the closed-form expressions of secrecy outage probabilities for both ORS and SRS schemes are derived. For the purpose of comparison, the classical round-robin relay selection (RRRS) is also analyzed in terms of secrecy outage probability. Furthermore, the numerical results show that ORS achieves the best performance and RRRS performs the worst in terms of secrecy outage probability.