Robust MIMO Harvest-and-Jam Helpers and Relaying for Secret Communications.
Hong Xing, Kai‐Kit Wong, Zheng Chu, Arumugam Nallanathan
Abstract
Cooperative jamming has been demonstrated to be an effective means to provide secret wireless communications and yet this is realized at the expense of the power consumption of the friendly jammers. This paper considers the scenario where friendly jammers harvest energy wirelessly from the signal transmitted by the source, and then use only the harvested energy to transmit the jamming signals for improving the secrecy of the communications of the source to the destination. In particular, we investigate the use of multi-antenna harvest-and-jam (HJ) helpers in a multi-antenna amplify-and-forward (AF) relay wiretap channel assuming that the direct link between the source and destination is broken. Our goal is to maximize the achievable secrecy rate at the destination subject to the transmit power constraints of the AF relay and HJ helpers. In the case of perfect channel state information (CSI), the joint optimization of the artificial noise (AN) covariance for jamming and the AF beamforming matrix is presented as well as a suboptimal solution with lower complexity based on semidefinite relaxation (SDR) which is tight in this case. For the practical case where the CSI is imperfect at both the relay and the HJ helpers, we provide the formulation of the robust optimization for maximizing the worst-case secrecy rate. Using SDR techniques, a near-optimal robust scheme is proposed. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the HJ protocol.