Performance Analysis of the Amplify-and-Forward Scheme under Interference Constraint and Physical Layer Security

The underlay protocol is a cognitive radio method in which secondary or cognitive users use the same frequency without affecting the quality of service (QoS) for the primary users. In addition, because of the broadcast characteristics of the wireless environment, some nodes, which are called eavesdropper nodes, want to illegally receive information that is intended for other communication links. Hence, Physical Layer Security is applied considering the achievable secrecy rate (ASR) to prevent this from happening. In this paper, a performance analysis of the amplify-and-forward scheme under an interference constraint and Physical Layer Security is investigated in the cooperative communication mode. In this model, the relays use an amplifyand- forward method to help transmit signals from a source to a destination. The best relay is chosen using an opportunistic relay selection method, which is based on the end-to-end ASR. The system performance is evaluated in terms of the outage probability of the ASR. The lower and upper bounds of this probability, based on the global statistical channel state information (CSI), are derived in closed form. Our simulation results show that the system performance improves when the distances from the relays to the eavesdropper are larger than the distances from the relays to the destination, and the cognitive network is far enough from the primary user.