Energy Harvesting for Physical Layer Security in Cooperative Networks Based on Compressed Sensing

Energy harvesting (EH) has attracted a lot of attention in cooperative communication networks studies for its capability of transferring energy from sources to relays. In this paper, we study the secrecy capacity of a cooperative compressed sensing amplify and forward (CCS-AF) wireless network in the presence of eavesdroppers based on an energy harvesting protocol. In this model, the source nodes send their information to the relays simultaneously, and then the relays perform EH from the received radio-frequency signals based on the power splitting-based relaying (PSR) protocol. The energy harvested by the relays will be used to amplify and forward the received information to the destination. The impacts of some key parameters, such as the power splitting ratio, energy conversion efficiency, relay location, and the number of relays, on the system secrecy capacity are analyzed through a group of experiments. Simulation results reveal that under certain conditions, the proposed EH relaying scheme can achieve higher secrecy capacity than traditional relaying strategies while consuming equal or even less power.