This article proposes a cooperative friendly jamming framework for swarm unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying networks with wireless energy harvesting (EH). In particular, we consider a swarm of hovering UAVs that relays information from a terrestrial base station to a distant mobile user and simultaneously generates friendly jamming signals to interfere/obfuscate an eavesdropper. Due to the limited energy of the UAVs, we develop a collaborative time-switching relaying protocol that allows the UAVs to collaborate in harvesting wireless energy, relay information, and jam the eavesdropper. To evaluate the performance, we derive the secrecy outage probability (SOP) for two popular detection techniques at the eavesdropper, i.e., selection combining and maximum-ratio combining. Monte Carlo simulations are then used to validate the theoretical SOP derivation. Using the derived SOP, one can obtain engineering insights to optimize the EH time and the number of UAVs in the swarm to achieve a given secrecy protection level. Furthermore, simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of SOP compared to the conventional AF relaying system. The analytical SOP derived in this work can also be helpful in future UAV secure-communication optimizations (e.g., trajectory and locations of UAVs). As an example, we present a case study to find the optimal corridor to locate the swarm so as to minimize the system SOP. Our proposed framework helps secure communications for various applications that require large coverage, e.g., industrial IoT, smart city, intelligent transportation systems, and critical IoT infrastructures, such as energy and water.

This work investigates the secrecy capability of energy harvesting based overlay cognitive networks (EHOCNs). To this end, we assume that a message by a licensed transmitter is relayed by an unlicensed sender. Critically, the unlicensed sender uses energy harvested from licensed signals, enhancing the overall energy efficiency and maintaining the integrity of licensed communications. To secure messages broadcast by the unlicensed sender against the wire-tapper, full-duplex destinations – unlicensed recipient and licensed receiver – jam the eavesdropper at the same time they receive signals from the unlicensed sender. To this effect, we derive closed-form formulas for the secrecy outage probability, which then quantify the security performance of both unlicensed and licensed communications for EHOCNs with jamming-assisted full-duplex destinations, namely EHOCNwFD. In addition, optimum operating parameters are established, which can serve as essential design guidelines of such systems.

The paper exploits overt information of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems for camouflage to hide covert information. The optimum strategy of hiding information at the transmitter, accounting for the probability of the warden’s detection error and the resulting spectral efficiency of the covert information under the covertness requirement, is determined. The results show that the optimum strategy of hiding the covert information is to superimpose it onto the overt NOMA information which is hardest-decoded, increasing to 1 the probability of detection error at the warden when the number of NOMA users accretes. This indicates that the multiplicity of NOMA users can be leveraged to hide the covert information in NOMA systems. In addition, various results prove the increase in the covert spectral efficiency with increasing the number of NOMA users while guaranteeing the probability of the warden’s detection error close to 1.

This study first modifies the traditional partial relay selection in cooperative cognitive networks to prevent error propagation and then proposes exact and asymptotic outage analysis for the modified partial relay selection under practical operation conditions such as channel estimation errors (CEEs) on all wireless channels, independent and non‐identical fading distributions, interference power constraint, and maximum transmit power constraint. The proposed analysis is useful in assessing system performance in important parameters as well as providing insights into performance limits without exhaustive simulations. Moreover, in order to quantitatively evaluate the performance gain of utilising the direct channel between the source and the destination in relaying communications, the authors extend their proposed analysis to dual‐hop cognitive networks. Illustrative results demonstrate that CEEs and outage threshold significantly degrade system performance, and the direct channel dramatically contributes to performance improvement of relaying communications.

This paper improves energy efficiency and communications reliability for wireless transmission under $\kappa$-$\mu$ shadowed fading (i.e., integrating all channel impairments including path loss, shadowing, fading) and hardware impairment by employing a nonlinear energy harvester and multi-antenna power transmitter. To this end, this paper provides explicit formulas for outage probability. Numerous results corroborate these formulas and expose that energy-harvesting nonlinearity, hardware impairment, and channel conditions drastically deteriorate system performance. Notwithstanding, energy-harvesting nonlinearity influences system performance more severely than hardware impairment. In addition, desired system performance is accomplished flexibly and possibly by choosing a cluster of specifications. Remarkably, the proposed communications scheme obtains the optimal performance with the appropriate selection of the time-splitting factor.