Harvest-and-jam: Improving security for wireless energy harvesting cooperative networks

The emerging radio signal enabled simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), has drawn significant attention. To achieve secrecy transmission by cooperative jamming, especially in the upcoming 5G networks with self-sustainable mobile base stations (BSs) and yet not to add extra power consumption, we propose in this paper a new relay protocol, i.e., harvest-and-jam (HJ), in a relay wiretap channel with an additional set of spare helpers. Specifically, in the first transmission phase, a single-antenna transmitter (Tx) transfers signals carrying both information and energy to a multi-antenna amplify-and-forward (AF) relay and a group of multi-antenna helpers; in the second transmission phase, the AF relay processes the information and forwards it to the receiver while each of the helpers generates an artificial noise (AN), the power of which is constrained by its previously harvested energy, to interfere with the eavesdropper. By optimizing the transmit beamforming matrix for the AF relay and the covariance matrix for the AN, we maximize the secrecy rate for the receiver subject to transmit power constraints for the AF relay and all helpers. The formulated problem is shown to be non-convex, for which we propose an iterative algorithm based on alternating optimization. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by simulations as compared to other heuristic schemes.