Energy efficient beamforming for secure communication in cognitive radio networks

In this paper, we study the energy efficiency of secure communication in an underlay cognitive radio network (CRN). We first formulate an optimization problem to maximize the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) while meeting the quality-of-service (QoS) requirement for the primary user and the transmit power constraint at each base station. Since the problem is non-convex and very difficult to solve, we then convert the original fractional form into a subtractive one, and adopt the difference of two-convex functions (D.C.) approximation method to obtain an equivalent convex problem. Furthermore, a two-layer iterative algorithm is presented to solve the problem and obtain the optimal beamforming (BF) weight vectors. Finally, numerical results are provided to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme.