Secrecy Rate Maximization in Virtual-MIMO Enabled SWIPT for 5G Centric IoT Applications

In 5G centric sensors-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) applications, virtual multiple-input multiple-output (V-MIMO) technique has witnessed significant attention as physical layer security enabler. In IoT, physical layer security is potential due to the vulnerability of wireless broadcasting in low computation capability and limited power source of the sensor nodes. In this regard, this article presents a secure and energy efficient V-MIMO enabled simultaneous wireless information and power transfer framework. The security framework uses beamforming and cooperative jamming signal to maximize the secrecy rate of the IoT systems. An optimization problem is formulated by collectively optimizing the beamforming vector, power splitting ratio, and time switching ratio. Since the maximization problem is nonconvex, to find solution of the problem an iterative algorithm is presented, which inherently uses the penalty function to find the solution. It is evident from simulation results that the secrecy rate optimization of the proposed framework is better as compared to the state-of-the-art techniques considering various metrics.