Secure Energy Efficiency Maximization for Untrusted Wireless-Powered Full-Duplex Relay Networks Under Nonlinear Energy Harvesting

In this article, we raise the concern on secure energy efficiency (SEE) over the wireless-powered untrusted relay networks with nonlinear energy harvesting (EH). To achieve data confidentiality and secrecy performance enhancement concurrently, the untrusted relay can enable simultaneous energy signal reception and confidential information forwarding during the second phase, where no dedicated energy transmission phase or relaying signal splitting is needed for the energy supply. In particular, with the help of destination jamming, the relay can also harvest energy from source signal and jamming signal during the first phase, which is different from conventional relaying protocol that only harvests energy from source and recycled energy. Considering the nonlinear EH efficiency, our objective is to maximize the SEE through piecewise region selection and power allocation. To address this intractable nonconvex problem, a two-layer algorithm based on optimization decoupling, fractional programming, Lagrange dual decomposition and difference of convex functions (DC) programming is proposed. The core idea of the proposed algorithm is to convert the primary problem into simple subproblems by sequentially exploiting the above-mentioned optimization methods. Simulation results reveal the superior secrecy performance of the proposed scheme. The proposed algorithm achieves near-optimal solutions with faster convergence rate.