Security and reliability performance analysis for two‐way wireless energy harvesting based untrusted relaying with cooperative jamming

Abstract

In this study, the authors investigate the security and the reliability performance of a two-way relay-based network, where a source-destination pair establishes secured communication through a wireless-powered untrusted amplify-and-forward relay while employing a friendly jammer. The relay utilises the harvested energy from radio-frequency signals sent by the sources to forward the received data; however, the friendly jammer employs that to generate and transmit noise-like signals to confuse the curious relay. Two power transmission protocols, namely variable power transmission (VPT) and constant power transmission (CPT) at the jammer and relay are adopted. As a benchmark to highlight the performance advantages of employing a jammer, they also considered the case of zero power transmission (ZPT), where there is no jammer in the network. For the three scenarios, the intercept probability (IP) and the connection outage probability (COP), as well-known secrecy criteria associated with the successful transmission are mathematically examined. Finally, the derived expressions are confirmed by comparison with Monte-Carlo simulations and furthermore, numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effects of system parameters on the IP and the COP metrics. Specifically, they find that jammer's artificial noise distribution plays a paramount role in the secrecy performance of the considered system.