Secrecy Performance in the Internet of Things: Optimal Energy Harvesting Time Under Constraints of Sensors and Eavesdroppers

In this paper, we investigate the physical layer security (PLS) performance for the Internet of Things (IoT), which is modeled as an IoT sensor network (ISN). The considered system consists of multiple power transfer stations (PTSs), multiple IoT sensor nodes (SNs), one legitimate fusion center (LFC) and multiple eavesdropping fusion centers (EFCs), which attempt to extract the transmitted information at SNs without an active attack. The SNs and the EFCs are equipped with a single antenna, while the LFC is equipped with multiple antennas. Specifically, the SNs harvest energy from the PTSs and then use the harvested energy to transmit the information to the LFC. In this research, the energy harvesting (EH) process is considered in the following two strategies: 1) the SN harvests energy from all PTSs, and 2) the SN harvests energy from the best PTS. To guarantee security for the considered system before the SN sends the packet, the SN’s power is controlled by a suitable power policy that is based on the channel state information (CSI), harvested energy, and security constraints. An algorithm for the nearly optimal EH time is implemented. Accordingly, the analytical expressions for the existence probability of secrecy capacity and secrecy outage probability (SOP) are derived by using the statistical characteristics of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In addition, we analyze the secrecy performance for various system parameters, such as the location of system elements, the number of PTSs, and the number of EFCs. Finally, the results of Monte Carlo simulations are provided to confirm the correctness of our analysis and derivation.