Secrecy Throughput Optimization for the WPCNs With Non-Linear EH Model

This paper investigates secure communication from a wireless-powered transmitter to a desired receiver with multiple eavesdroppers in the wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs). Considering the non-linear energy harvesting (EH) model, we propose a secure two-phase communication protocol with the help of a hybrid base station (HBS). First, in the power transfer (PT) phase, the HBS transfers wireless power to the transmitter. Then in the subsequent secure information transmission (SIT) phase, the transmitter sends the secret information using the energy harvested in the PT, under the protection of artificial noise (AN) generated by the HBS. First, based on this communication protocol, we maximize the secrecy throughput with perfect channel information state (CSI) under the transmit power constraint at the HBS. The secrecy throughput maximization (STM) problem is non-convex, and hence we reformulate it by exploiting the primal decomposition method (PDM) to obtain tractable forms. The PDM-based transmit scheme (PDM-TS) is proposed for the STM. In addition, considering the imperfect CSI of wiretap channel, we further design the robust transmit scheme for the worst-case secrecy throughput maximization (wSTM) problem. Since the wSTM shows high non-convexity, we extend the PDM by combining it with the S -procedure, and the PDM-based robust transmit scheme (PDM-RTS) is proposed for the wSTM. Finally, the numerical simulations are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed transmit schemes.