Secrecy Performance Optimization for Wireless Powered Communication Networks with an Energy Harvesting Jammer

In this paper, we consider a wireless powered communication network with an energy harvesting (EH) jammer where eavesdroppers try to wiretap the communication between users and a hybrid access-point (H-AP). In our system, the H-AP first transmits an energy signal to recharge the batteries of the EH users and the EH jammer in the energy transfer (ET) phase. Then, in the subsequent information transfer (IT) phase, each user sends information to the H-AP in a time division multiple access manner, while the jammer generates jamming signals to interfere the eavesdroppers. We adopt two different secrecy performance measurements according to the level of channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdroppers. First, with a single user, we maximize the secrecy rate by optimizing the time allocation between the ET and the IT phase when perfect CSI of the eavesdroppers is available at all nodes. In contrast, when the instantaneous CSI of the eavesdroppers is not available at legitimate nodes, we analyze and minimize the secrecy outage probability. We also extend the single user analysis to a more general multi-user situation with an additional consideration of the transmit power allocation at the jammer. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our proposed solutions through simulations and demonstrate that a performance gain compared to conventional schemes becomes more pronounced with the increased number of eavesdroppers and users.