An adaptive cooperative scheme is proposed to improve the security of a wireless-powered relay network. A source node sends data to a destination node in the presence of an amplify-and-forward untrusted relay node and an alien eavesdropper where both are assumed to attempt to decode the source’s information signal. The source uses a fraction of its transmit power to send a jamming signal to keep its information confidential. To save energy, the energy-harvesting relay node transmits with the minimum power level that ensures secure transmissions. We derive a closed-form upper bound on the system’s secrecy outage probability. The proposed cooperative scheme is more efficient than the conventional scheme, where once the relay has accumulated sufficient energy, it assists the source’s information transmission.
An adaptive cooperative scheme is proposed to improve the security of a wireless-powered relay network. A source node sends data to a destination node in the presence of an amplify-and-forward untrusted relay node and an alien eavesdropper where both are assumed to attempt to decode the source’s information signal. The source uses a fraction of its transmit power to send a jamming signal to keep its information confidential. To save energy, the energy-harvesting relay node transmits with the minimum power level that ensures secure transmissions. We derive a closed-form upper bound on the system’s secrecy outage probability. The proposed cooperative scheme is more efficient than the conventional scheme, where once the relay has accumulated sufficient energy, it assists the source’s information transmission.
Energy harvesting (EH) technology has imposed new constraints on the amount of time an energy-constrained relay node needs to use for EH and information forwarding. Moreover, EH techniques may increase vulnerability to eavesdropping, since a power receiver, as a potential eavesdropper, usually has a shorter access distance than an information receiver. Motivated by this issue, in this paper, we investigate a tradeoff between energy consumption and physical layer security in a wireless powered-untrusted cooperative communication (WPUCC) network consisting of one source-destination pair and multiple amplify-and-forward untrusted relays. To minimize the energy consumption of the network, we propose a secure adaptive relay-based cooperation approach. Moreover, a greedy battery-aware relay-selection scheme is proposed to minimize the power consumption in WPUCC systems. Using power-splitting-based energy accumulation, untrusted relays attempt to intercept the information intended to the legitimate destination while harvesting energy at the same time. To keep the information secure from potential eavesdropping, the source injects a jamming signal along with its data signal. By modeling the dynamic behavior of the relay battery as a finite-state Markov chain, we derive an analytical expression for the secrecy outage probability of our proposed secure adaptive harvest-use-store cooperative communication scheme and show that it is more secure than its direct transmission and pure two-hop transmission counterparts.
We propose a new scheme to secure a wireless-powered untrusted cooperative-communication network, where a legitimate source node (Alice) transmits her information messages to a legitimate destination node (Bob) through the multiple amplify-and-forward untrusted relays. The relay nodes are assumed to be honest but curious nodes; hence, they are trusted at the service level but are untrusted at the information level. To reduce the energy consumption of the network, only one relay node is selected in each time slot to forward Alice's information signal. We assume a power-splitting-based energy-harvesting scheme, where each relay node splits its received signal into information and energy streams. Since the relay nodes are assumed to be untrusted at the information level, they attempt to decode the information intended to Bob while harvesting energy at the same time. When the relaying mode is selected, the scheme is realized over two non-overlapping time phases. To prevent any information leakage to the untrusted relay nodes, Bob and a cooperative jammer (John) inject jamming (artificial noise) signals during the first phase. During the second phase, the untrusted relay nodes that will not be forwarding the information signal must harvest energy to accumulate more energy to help Alice in future time slots. Moreover, the cooperative jammer will jam the untrusted relays to further power their batteries and prevent them from decoding the information-forwarding relay signal in case they decided to cheat and decode it. We model the battery state transitions at each relay as a finite-state Markov chain and analyze it. Our numerical results show the security gains of our proposed scheme relative to two benchmark schemes.
The broadcast nature of the wireless medium allows unintended users to eavesdrop on confidential information transmission. In this regard, we investigate the problem of secure communication between a source and a destination via a wireless energy harvesting untrusted node that acts as a helper to relay the information; however, the source and destination nodes wish to keep the information confidential from the relay node. To realize the positive secrecy rate, we use destination-assisted jamming. Being an energy-starved node, the untrusted relay harvests energy from the received radio-frequency (RF) signals, which include the source's information signal and the destination's jamming signal. Thus, we utilize the jamming signal efficiently by leveraging it as a useful energy source. At the relay, to enable energy harvesting and information processing, we adopt power splitting (PS) and time switching (TS) policies. To evaluate the secrecy performance of this proposed scenario, we derive analytical expressions for two important metrics, viz., the secrecy outage probability and the ergodic secrecy rate. The numerical analysis reveals design insights into the effects of different system parameters such as PS ratio, energy harvesting time, target secrecy rate, transmit signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), relay location, and energy conversion efficiency factor, on secrecy performance. Specifically, the PS policy achieves better optimal secrecy outage probability and optimal ergodic secrecy rate than that of the TS policy at higher target secrecy rate and transmit SNR, respectively.
In this paper, the secrecy outage performance of a three-node amplify-and-forward relay network with an untrustworthy relay is investigated. To enable a secure transmission, we consider a destination-based jamming technique to prevent the relay from successfully decoding the secret messages between the source and the destination. In addition, the relay is assumed to be an energy-constrained device, thus being first energized by the source in order to be able to retransmit the information to the destination. In doing so, a time switching-based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer scheme is used. A closed-form asymptotic expression for the secrecy outage probability is derived in order to obtain a tight approximation at medium-to-high signal-to-noise ratio. The accuracy of the performed analysis is corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations through different illustrative cases. Numerical results show the impact of key system parameters on the secrecy performance, such as the time allocation factor between the energy harvesting and information transmission phases, the power allocation factor between source and destination for cooperative jamming, and the relay position, so as to provide insights on the design criteria for energy efficient and secure networks.
This paper investigates secure transmission in a wireless powered communication network (WPCN) with an energy harvesting (EH) source configured with multiple antennas. In the WPCN, the EH source harvests energy from the radio frequency (RF) signals broadcasted by a power beacon (PB), and purely relies on the harvested energy to communicate with the destination in the presence of passive eavesdroppers. It is noteworthy that the RF-EH source is equipped with a finite energy storage to accumulate the harvested energy. To enhance the security, we propose an energy-aware transmit antenna selection (EATAS) scheme. According to the energy status and the channel quality, the source adaptively decides to transmit confidential information or harvest RF energy. For evaluating the secrecy performance, we first study the evolution of the energy storage, and then derive the analytical expressions of connection outage probability (COP), secrecy outage probability (SOP) and effective secrecy throughput (EST). Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed scheme outperforms the existing accumulate-then-transmit (ATT) scheme.
This article investigates secure communication between a source and a destination via multiple radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) relays, in which the RF-EH relays are untrusted and apply the amplify-and-forward policy. On the one hand, to prevent the untrusted relays from eavesdropping the confidential information, the destination-aided jamming is employed, in which the destination emits jamming signal to interfere the relays while the source transmits information signal. On the other hand, the power splitting (PS) policy is adopted at the relays to harvest energy and process information, in which every relay has a finite energy storage to accumulate the energy harvested from the source’s information signal and destination’s jamming signal. To achieve energy-efficient and fully distributed implementation, we propose an energy-aware distributed beamforming (EADB) scheme, in which each relay only needs local information to decide whether to assist the source-destination communication. To evaluate the secrecy performance of the EADB scheme, the charging and discharging behaviors of the relays’ energy storage are first tracked using the Markov chain. On this basis, we derive analytical expressions for the hybrid outage probability (HOP) and secure energy efficiency (SEE) of the considered network. Finally, numerical results show that the EADB scheme has a better secrecy performance than the existing scheme. In addition, despite the curiousness of the untrusted relays, deploying more relays and increasing their energy storage capacity can enhance the security of the considered network.