Secure information transmission in the presence of energy-harvesting eavesdroppers in multi-cell networks

In this paper, we study simultaneous data transmission and power transfer for multiple information receivers (IRs) and energy-harvesting receivers (ERs) in cellular networks. We propose an optimization problem to maximize a linear combination of the useful signal power at each IR and total received power at each ER subject to the following three sets of constraints: i) data reliability by maintaining the required level of signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) for all IRs; ii) information security by keeping leakage SINR levels of all IRs at every ER below a predefined value, which helps prevent possible eavesdroppers, i.e., ERs, from detecting information aimed for the IRs; and iii) power consumption by guaranteeing that the transmit power at each base station is within its available budget. Using semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique, we then transform the proposed problem into a convex form. We further prove that the transformed problem always yields rank-one optimal solution. Hence, our approach does not require any computationally expensive randomization procedure, as usually utilized in a typical SDR method, in obtaining optimal solutions. Simulation results indicate that the proposed approach prevails conventional scheme in terms of providing higher IRs' total throughput, higher received power level at each ER and more secure for the transmission of information.