Exploiting Opportunistic Scheduling Schemes and WPT-Based Multi-Hop Transmissions to Improve Physical Layer Security in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper studies the secrecy performance of wireless power transfer (WPT)-based multi-hop transmissions in wireless sensors networks (WSNs), where legitimate nodes harvest energy from multiple power beacons (PBs) to support the multi-hop secure data transmission to a destination in the presence of an eavesdropper. Specifically, the PBs not only transfer radio frequency energy to the legitimate nodes but also act as friendly jammers to protect data transmission. To improve secrecy performance, we propose two secure scheduling schemes, named minimum node selection (MNS) scheme and optimal node selection (ONS) scheme. We then evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes in terms of the exact closed-form for secrecy outage probability (SOP) and asymptotic SOP. The developed analyses are verified by Monte-Carlo simulations. The numerical results show that the ONS scheme outperforms the MNS scheme emerging as an effective protocol for secure multi-hop transmission in WSNs. Furthermore, the effects of the number of PBs, number of hops, time switching ratio, and the secure target data rate on the system performance are also investigated.