| Abstract: | In this paper, an underlay spectrum-sharing system with Alamouti orthogonal space–time block coding (OSTBC) is considered to analyze and evaluate the physical layer security (PLS) performance of the cognitive radio system under a practical scenario with spatially correlated transmit antennas. It is assumed that there exists a passive eavesdropper and the cognitive channel and the wiretap channel follow Rayleigh fading distribution. To investigate and study the PLS performance of the cognitive system, first closed-form expressions are derived for three PLS metrics, namely: the probability of strictly-positive secrecy capacity (PSPSC), the secrecy outage probability (SOP), and the average secrecy capacity (ASC). Then numerical results obtained from the derived closed-form expressions are presented and validated by the computer simulations, to study the effects of spatial correlation on the PLS performance of the considered cognitive radio system under different parameters. It is shown that increasing the SNR of the cognitive system (Alice-to-Bob) channel yields an improvement in the PLS of the cognitive system. Moreover, a smaller value of the eavesdropping (Alice-to-Eve) channel SNR always leads to a better PLS for the cognitive system. It is also observed that the spatial correlation related to Alice-to-Bob channel degrades the PLS, and the spatial correlation related to Alice-to-Eve channel has less impact on the PLS performance. |
