On secure wireless sensor networks with cooperative energy harvesting relaying

In this paper, we investigate the physical layer security (PLS) of a wireless sensor network (WSN) that consists of a base station (BS), multiple sensor nodes (SNs), and multiple energy-limited relays (ERs) in the presence of a passive eavesdropper (EAV). We adopt a time-switching/power-splitting (TSPS) mechanism for information transmission. The communication protocol is divided into two phases. The purpose of the first phase is to decode information, and energy harvesting (EH) is performed in accordance with the TSPS protocol. The purpose of the second phase is to transmit information to multiple destinations using the amplify-and-forward (AF) technique. In this study, we introduce a multirelay cooperative scheme (MRCS) to improve the secrecy performance. We derive analytical expressions for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) of the MRCS and that of the noncooperative relay scheme (NCRS) by using the statistical characteristics of the signalto-noise ratio (SNR). Specifically, we propose an optimal relay selection scheme to guarantee the security of the system for the MRCS. In addition, Monte Carlo simulation results are presented to confirm the accuracy of our analysis based on simulations of the secrecy performance under various system parameters, such as the positions and number of ERs, the EH time, and the EH efficiency coefficients. Finally, the simulation results show that the secrecy performance of our MRCS is higher than that of the NCRS and the traditional cooperative relay scheme (TCRS).