In this study, we investigate energy-efficient secure communications for wireless-powered cognitive ratio networks, in which multiple secondary users (SUs) share the same frequency band with primary users (PUs) and energy harvesting (EH) nodes harvest energy from the transmitted signals, even though information decoding is not permitted. To maximize the average secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) of SUs while ensuring acceptable interference on PUs and the required amount of energy for the EH nodes, we propose an energy-efficient transmit power control algorithm using dual decomposition, wherein suboptimal transmit powers are determined in an iterative manner with low complexity. Through extensive simulations in various scenarios, we verify that the proposed scheme has a higher average SEE than conventional schemes and a considerably shorter computation time than the optimal scheme.
Keywords: cognitive radio; energy harvesting; low complexity; secrecy energy efficiency; transmit power control.