Secrecy Wireless Information and Power Transfer in Ultra-Dense Cloud Radio Access Networks

Considering the charging needs of the Internet of Things, we introduce the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technology into the ultra-dense cloud radio access network (UD-CRAN) with wireless fronthaul. However, SWIPT can bring potential eavesdropping issues. In this paper, we study the secure communication caused by SWIPT in the UD-CRAN network. Specifically, the transmission schemes of wireless fronthaul and access links are jointly designed, while addressing the characteristics of ultra-dense networks, such as base station diversity and high probability of line-of-sight transmission. Aiming at maximizing the security energy efficiency, we jointly optimize the power allocation in the fronthaul and the resource allocation in the access link which includes beamforming for information and energy transmission, on/off of remote radio heads (RRHs), and user-RRH association. We propose an iterative algorithm based on the Dinkelbach’s transform to deal with the fractional objective function. To solve the mix-integer non-convex inner problem, we design: (1) a successive convex approximation (SCA) based method in which the problem at each iteration is a mixed-integer second-order cone program; (2) and an alternating optimization algorithm based on semidefinite relaxation (SDR) to further balance the complexity and performance. Finally, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed schemes. Moreover, the proposed SCA method can achieve excellent performance while preserving integer variables, which inevitably increases algorithm complexity. Furthermore, the proposed SDR method can avoid the iteration process of SCA and further reducing the algorithm complexity.