The secrecy rate represents the amount of information per unit time that can
be securely sent on a communication link. In this work, we investigate the
achievable secrecy rates in an energy harvesting communication system composed
of a transmitter, a receiver and a malicious eavesdropper. In particular,
because of the energy constraints and the channel conditions, it is important
to understand when a device should transmit and to optimize how much power
should be used in order to improve security. Both full knowledge and partial
knowledge of the channel are considered under a Nakagami fading scenario. We
show that high secrecy rates can be obtained only with power and coding rate
adaptation. Moreover, we highlight the importance of optimally dividing the
transmission power in the frequency domain, and note that the optimal scheme
provides high gains in secrecy rate over the uniform power splitting case.
Analytically, we explain how to find the optimal policy and prove some of its
properties. In our numerical evaluation, we discuss how the maximum achievable
secrecy rate changes according to the various system parameters. Furthermore,
we discuss the effects of a finite battery on the system performance and note
that, in order to achieve high secrecy rates, it is not necessary to use very
large batteries.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in
Communications (Mar. 2016
