Secrecy Wireless Information and Power Transfer in Fading Wiretap Channel

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has recently drawn significant interests for its dual use of radio signals to provide wireless data and energy access at the same time. However, a challenging secrecy communication problem arises in the SWIPT system since the messages sent to information receivers (IRs) may be eavesdropped by energy receivers (ERs), which are presumed to receive energy from the same signals broadcast by the transmitter. To tackle this problem, we propose in this paper an artificial noise (AN) aided transmission scheme to facilitate the secrecy information transmission to IRs and yet meet the energy harvesting requirement for ERs, under the assumption that the AN can be cancelled at IRs but not at ERs. Specifically, the proposed scheme splits the power at the transmitter into two parts, to send the confidential message to the IR and an AN to interfere with the ER against eavesdropping, respectively. Under a simplified three-node wiretap channel setup, the transmit power allocations and power splitting ratios over fading channels are jointly optimized to maximize the average secrecy information rate for the IR subject to a combination of average and peak power constraints at the transmitter as well as an average energy harvesting constraint at the ER. The formulated problem is shown to be non-convex, for which we propose an efficient algorithm by iteratively optimizing the transmit power allocations and power splitting ratios over fading channels. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by simulations and compared against other heuristic schemes in terms of achievable (secrecy) rate-energy trade-off.