Abstract
This study investigates the secrecy outage performance of a single-input multiple-output underlay cognitive radio network (CRN) with outdated channel state information (CSI). The confidential messages are transmitted from transmitter to the destination, while a multi-antenna eavesdropper exists. The maximal ratio combining and selection combining schemes are utilised at the receivers to improve the quality of the received signal-to-noise ratio. The exact and asymptotic closed-form expressions of secrecy outage probability are derived, and simulation results are provided to verify the authors' proposed analytical results. The results reveal that imperfect CSI of main channels deteriorates the secrecy outage performance while that of eavesdropping and interfering channels has contrary effect, and only a unity diversity order can be obtained in underlay CRNs with imperfect CSI.