Securing Multiuser Communications via an Energy Harvesting Node: Jammer or Relay?

In this paper, we study the secure communication problem of a wireless multiuser network consisting of a base station (BS), multiple users, and an energy harvesting (EH) node in the face of an eavesdropper. We focus on the question that which role the EH node plays, as a friendly jammer or as a cooperative decode-and-forward (DF) relay. Accordingly, we propose two EH node aided multiuser scheduling schemes to help the secure communications between BS and multiple users, i.e., the EH jammer aided transmission (EHJT) scheme where the EH node acts as a friendly jammer and the EH relay aided transmission (EHRT) scheme where the EH node acts as a cooperative DF relay. For comparison purposes, the direct transmission (DT) scheme is also presented. We analyze the security-reliability trade-off (SRT) performance of the proposed EHJT and EHRT schemes as well as the DT scheme in terms of deriving their exact and asymptotic expressions of outage and intercept probabilities. Additionally, we propose an iterative algorithm based on the golden search to determine the optimal time allocation factor (OTAF) for the sake of minimizing the sum of outage and intercept probabilities for the proposed EHJT and EHRT schemes. Numerical results show that the EH node can improve the SRT performance of the multiuser network more significantly as a friendly jammer than as a cooperative DF relay. It is also shown that the best SRT performance of the EHJT and EHRT schemes can be achieved by adjusting the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and time allocation factor.