Physical Layer Security in AF and CF Relay Networks with RF-Energy Harvesting

In this paper, we investigate the achievable secrecy rate in a relay channel where the source and the destination wish to keep the information confidential from an untrusted relay (potential eavesdropper). The relay has no energy supply, and harvests its required energy for relaying from its received signals. For radio-frequency (RF) Energy Harvesting (EH) at the relay, we adopt power splitting (PS) approach. We study the problem of achieving positive secrecy rates between the transmitter and the receiver while making use of an untrusted relay. Energy limitation at the relay makes the problem more interesting. Because, the relay must choose either to eavesdrop the signal to be able to decode or to harvest energy (from the information signal) to be able to forward the message. Our scheme to guarantee the secrecy uses cooperative jamming by either the destination or an extra jammer node. We derive the achievable secrecy rates for the compress-and-forward (CF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) relays for two different scenarios. First, we assume the destination and the jammer are two separate nodes. Then, we consider destination-assisted jamming. In addition, we let the relay to use both the source’s and the jammer’s transmitted signals to harvest energy. Our numerical results show that our proposed schemes guarantee a positive secrecy rate by properly locating the jammer and allocating enough cooperative jamming power. However, for a given power budget (i.e., fixed total transmission and cooperative jamming power) there is an optimum amount for the cooperative jamming power.