On the Secrecy Performance of SWIPT Receiver Architectures with Multiple Eavesdroppers

Abstract: Physical layer security (PLS) has been shown to hold promise as a new paradigm for securing wireless links. In contrast with the conventional cryptographic techniques, PLS methods exploit the random fading in wireless channels to provide link security. As the channel dynamics prevent a constant rate of secure communications between the legitimate terminals, the outage probability of the achievable secrecy rate is used as a measure of the secrecy performance. This work investigates the secrecy outage probability of a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system, which operates in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers that also have the energy harvesting capability. The loss in secrecy performance due to eavesdropper collusion, i.e., information sharing between the eavesdroppers to decode the secret message, is also analyzed. We derive closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability for Nakagami-$m$ fading on the links and imperfect channel estimation at the receivers. Our analysis considers different combinations of the separated and the integrated SWIPT receiver architectures at the receivers. Numerical results are provided to validate our analysis.