Physical Layer Security with RF Energy Harvesting Protocols for Wireless Networks

In this paper, the secrecy performance of two energy harvesting (EH) protocols, known as, time switching (TS) and power splitting (PS) is analyzed for a single hop relaying network, in which the sender sends the data to legitimate destination using a relay in the presence of an eavesdropper. In the considered network, the relay and source are powered up by using energy harvesting techniques. The performance of the systems with EH is compared with that of the conventional physical layer security model, where nodes are powered up by individual battery sources. The secrecy rates with the two different types of EH protocols and conventional system are analyzed for two relaying schemes: decode-and-forward (DF), and amplify-and-forward (AF). Resulting analysis shows that the TS EH system has higher secrecy rate as compared to conventional system and the secrecy rate of the conventional system is higher than that of PS EH protocol. Further, the simulation results show that AF relays outperforms DF relays in all the scenarios.