Physical Layer Security for Cognitive Multiuser Networks With Hardware Impairments and Channel Estimation Errors

In this paper, we investigate the physical layer security for a cognitive multiuser network which is composed of multiple cognitive sources, a cognitive destination and an eavesdropper under the joint impact of hardware impairments (HIs) and channel estimation errors (CEEs). We consider a practical scenario where mutual interference exists between the primary users and cognitive users. To achieve high physical layer security with low implementation complexity, we propose three pure user scheduling schemes, namely, selection combining (SC) scheme, threshold-based switched diversity (tSD) scheme and switch-and-examine combining with post-selection (SECps) scheme. To further improve physical layer security, we present an extension of our SC framework to a jammer aided multiuser network and propose a jammer aided SC (JSC) scheme. We derive the closed-form intercept probability (IP), outage probability (OP) and effective secrecy throughput (EST) expressions for SC, tSD, SECps and JSC schemes over Nakagami-
$m$
channels to analyze the system performance. Numerical results show that among the three pure multiuser scheduling schemes, the SC scheme achieves the best secrecy performance with the highest complexity, the SECps scheme obtains the worst secrecy performance with the lowest complexity. In addition, the secrecy performance of JSC scheme is better than that of SC scheme in the high SNR region.