Robust artificial noise-aided transmit optimization for achieving secrecy and energy harvesting

Consider a wireless scenario in which a multi-antenna transmitter wants to send a confidential message to a single-antenna information receiver (IR) while transferring wireless energy to a number of multi-antenna energy receivers (ERs). In order to keep the ERs from retrieving the confidential message, an artificial noise (AN)-aided physical-layer secrecy approach is employed at the transmitter. The AN has dual purpose: First, it can interfere with the ERs' information receptions and thus help improve security. Secondly, it provides wireless energy for the ERs to harvest. Assuming imperfect channel state information at the transmitter, we jointly optimize the co-variances of confidential information and AN such that the secrecy rate at the IR is maximized, while each ER receives a prescribed amount of wireless energy. Although this secrecy-rate maximization problem is non-convex, we show that it can be handled by solving a sequence of convex optimization problems. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed design.