Exploiting Interference for Secrecy Wireless Information and Power Transfer

TL;DR

This paper reviews methods for secure wireless information and power transfer by using energy signals as interference to prevent eavesdropping, covering various practical setups and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides an overview of joint design strategies for energy and information signals to enhance security and efficiency in WIPT systems across multiple practical scenarios.

Findings

Energy signals can be used as interference to improve secrecy

Joint design of energy and information signals enhances security

Various practical setups for secure WIPT are analyzed

Abstract

Radio-frequency (RF) signals enabled wireless information and power transfer (WIPT) is a cost-effective technique to achieve two-way communications and at the same time provide energy supplies for low-power wireless devices. However, the information transmission in WIPT is vulnerable to the eavesdropping by the energy receivers (ERs). To achieve secrecy communications with information nodes (INs) while satisfying the energy transfer requirement of ERs, an efficient solution is to exploit a dual use of the energy signals also as useful interference or artificial noise (AN) to interfere with the ERs, thus preventing against their potential information eavesdropping. Towards this end, this article provides an overview on the joint design of energy and information signals to achieve energy-efficient and secure WIPT under various practical setups, including simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), wireless powered cooperative relaying and jamming, and wireless powered communication networks (WPCN). We also present some research directions that are worth pursuing in the future.