Exploiting Jamming Attacks for Energy Harvesting in Massive MIMO Systems

In this paper, the performance of an RF energy harvesting scheme for multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is investigated in the presence of multiple active jammers. The key idea is to exploit the jamming transmissions as an energy source to be harvested at the legitimate users. To this end, the achievable uplink sum rate expressions are derived in closed-form for two different antenna configurations. An optimal time-switching policy is also proposed to ensure user-fairness in terms of both harvested energy and achievable rate. Besides, the essential trade-off between the harvested energy and achievable sum rate are quantified in closed-form. Our analysis reveals that the massive MIMO systems can make use of RF signals of the jamming attacks for boosting the amount of harvested energy at the served users. Numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of the derived closed-form expressions over Monte-Carlo simulations.