Secrecy in Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract: With the considerable growth of wireless networks in recent years, the issue of network security has taken an important role in the design of communication devices and protocols. Indeed, due to the broadcast nature of these networks, communications can potentially be attacked by malicious parties, and therefore, the protection of transmitted data has become a main concern in today's communications. On the other hand the cooperation of nodes overhearing the transmission may potentially lead to a better performance. In this thesis we combine both fundamental concepts of cooperation and secrecy in wireless networks. In particular we investigate the cooperation between transmitters in a cognitive radio network where the secondary receiver is treated as a potential eavesdropper to the primary transmission. We study this novel model focusing on several fundamental aspects.First we derive achievable rate regions for different transmission schemes, such as cooperative jamming and relaying, with and without primary message knowledge at the secondary transmitter. For these schemes, we formulate and solve three relevant power allocation problems: the maximization of the achievable primary and secondary rates, and the minimization of the secondary transmitting power. We model the interaction between the transmitting users as a Stackelberg game corresponding to a more realistic power allocation problem. We solve the game and illustrate its impact on the achievable rates.Secondly we generalize our system model by introducing the multi-phase clean relaying (CR) scheme, which takes into account the message-learning constraint at the secondary transmitter, and we derive the achievable rate region for this scheme. We compare our CR scheme to other transmission strategies such as dirty paper coding, interference neutralization, and pure cooperative jamming. Thirdly we extend our model to the generalized scenario where multiple secondary transmitter-receiver pairs wish to access the spectrum. For this scenario, we define and study several types of games between the primary network and the secondary pairs, such as Stackelberg games, power control games, and auction games. We derive the equilibrium of each game considered, which allows us to predict the behavior of the users in the cognitive radio network with multiple secondary pairs.Moreover we consider the important concept of energy efficiency (EE) for the performance of the cognitive radio network and we derive the power allocation and power splitting maximizing the secondary transmitter's energy efficiency. An important EE Stackelberg game between the two transmitters is formulated, and the impact of the game theoretic interaction is analyzed. Finally we motivate and investigate information theoretic secrecy using key agreement techniques in wireless networks. In particular we derive achievable secret key rate regions for two different key agreement schemes in Gaussian channels using several transmission strategies such as power control and cooperative jamming. The interaction between transmitting users is analyzed from a game theoretic perspective using non-cooperative game theory.For every fundamental perspective considered for the analysis of the model studied in the thesis, our results are illustrated through numerical examples based on a geometrical setup, highlighting the impact of the node geometry on the achievable rates, the optimal strategies, the games' equilibria and the impact of the game theoretic interaction between transmitters on the system performance.