Security outage probability analysis of cognitive networks with multiple eavesdroppers for Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been recognised as having the potential to benefit a range of industrial sectors substantially. However, widespread development and deployment of IIoT systems are limited for some reasons, the most significant of which are a shortage of spectrum resources and network security issues. Given the heterogeneity of IIoT devices, typical cryptographic security techniques are insufficient since they can suffer from challenges including computation, storage, latency, and interoperability. This paper presents a physical layer security analysis of the underlying cognitive radio networks for IIoT. Through consideration of the spectrum, IIoT devices can opportunistically utilise the primary spectrum, thereby improving spectrum efficiency and allowing access by an increased number of devices. Specifically, we propose two cognitive relay transmission (CRT) schemes, optimal single CRT (O-SCRT) and multiple CRT (MCRT), to improve transmission reliability further. Since it is challenging to obtain channel state information in the wiretap link, we provide a sub-optimal single CRT scheme and derive closed-form expressions of security outage probability by invoking both selection combination and maximal ratio combination techniques at the eavesdropper. To provide a benchmark, the round-robin single CRT scheme is also analysed. Simulation results are provided to verify our analysis and show that O-SCRT provides the best system security outage performance