Physical Layer Security in AF-Based Cooperative SWIPT Sensor Networks

Physical layer security (PLS) with radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) in wireless sensor networks has received significant interest as a technology for secure information transmission and prolonging the network lifetime, as well as improving energy efficiency. This article investigates PLS for a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) cooperative network, which consists of multiple sensor sources, one EH relay (R), and one destination (D) in the presence of one eavesdropper (E). Furthermore, a low-complexity, suboptimal, yet efficient sensor source selection scheme is proposed. Specifically, one sensor source is chosen to transmit information to the relay and destination such that it obtains the best channel from sensor sources to the relay. Then, by considering two relaying strategies, termed the direct link plus static power splitting-based relaying (SPSR) and direct link plus optimal dynamic power splitting-based relaying (ODPSR), the performance analysis in terms of intercept probability (IP) and outage probability (OP) is carried out for each one. Notably, the eavesdropper and destination utilize maximal ratio combining (MRC) to incorporate the received signals from the selected sensor source and the relay, which poses new challenges in obtaining the analytical expressions. In this context, we derive analytical expressions for the OP (for SPSR and ODPSR) at the destination and the IP (for SPSR) at the eavesdropper by adopting the series representation of the modified Bessel function. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to validate the theoretical analysis and the proposed schemes’ effectiveness. Simulation results show the superiority of our scheme compared to the benchmarks.