Physical Layer Security of a Two-Hop Mixed RF-FSO System in a Cognitive Radio Network

Abstract

In this paper, the physical layer (PHY)security performance of a dual-hop cooperative relaying in a cognitive-radio system in the presence of an eavesdropper is investigated. The dual-hop transmission is composed of an asymmetric radio frequency (RF)link and a free space optical (FSO)link. In the considered system, an unlicensed secondary user (SU)uses the spectrum which is shared by a licensed primary user (PU)in a controlled manner to keep the interference at PU receiver, below a predefined value. Furthermore, among $M$ available relays, one relay with the best end-to-end signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR)is selected for transmission. It is assumed that all of the RF links follow Rayleigh fading and all of the FSO links follow Gamma-Gamma distribution. Simulations results for some important security metrics, such as the average secrecy capacity (SC), and secrecy outage probability (SOP)are presented, where some practical issues of FSO links such as atmospheric turbulence, and pointing errors are taken into consideration.