Secure Hybrid A/D Beamforming for Hardware-Efficient Large-Scale Multiple-Antenna SWIPT Systems

In this work, we investigate the problem of secure communications in a downlink large-scale multi-antenna assisted simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system, where a base station (BS) transmits signals to serve a number of information decoding (ID) and energy harvesting (EH) users. Considering that the EH users can potentially eavesdrop the ID users' confidential information, we study the robust joint design of the hybrid analog-digital (A/D) beamforming (BF) matrices and of the artificial redundant signal (ARS) covariance matrix at the BS, where the aim is to maximize the worst-case sum secrecy rate for the ID users under a transmit power constraint, a nonlinear EH constraint and a unit-modulus constraint on the entries of the analog BF matrix. The corresponding optimization problem is very challenging due to the nonlinear and nonconvex objective function and constraints. Using innovative optimization techniques, we first transform the original problem into an equivalent but more tractable form, and then develop a novel joint iterative algorithm based on the penalty-concave-convex procedure (CCCP) for solving the resultant problem. We show that the proposed penalty-CCCP based algorithm for ARS-aided robust joint hybrid BF design converges to a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker solution of the original problem, and also analyze its computational complexity. Our simulation results verify that the resultant robust joint hybrid BF design algorithm relying on ARS significantly outperforms the conventional hybrid BF benchmark algorithms and efficiently achieves the performance of the fully-digital BF with reduced number of radio frequency chains and energy consumption.