Secure communication via an energy-harvesting untrusted relay in the presence of an eavesdropper

This article studies a secure communication of a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer system in which an energy-constrained untrusted relay, which harvests energy from the wireless signals, helps the communication between the source and destination and is able to decode the source’s confidential signal. Additionally, the source’s confidential signal is also overheard by a passive eavesdropper. To create positive secrecy capacity, a destination-assisted jamming signal that is completely cancelled at the destination is adopted. Moreover, the jamming signal is also exploited as an additional energy source. To evaluate the secrecy performance, analytical expressions for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and the average secrecy capacity are derived. Moreover, a high-power approximation for the SOP is presented. The accuracy of the analytical results is verified by Monte Carlo simulations. Numerical results provide valuable insights into the effect of various system parameters, such as the energy-harvesting efficiency, secrecy rate threshold, power-splitting ratio, transmit powers, and locations of the relay and eavesdropper, on the secrecy performance.