Energy Harvesting from Jamming Attacks in Multi-User Massive MIMO Networks

5G communication systems enable new functions and major performance improvements but at the cost of tougher energy requirements on mobile devices. One of the effective ways to address this issue along with alleviating the environmental effects associated with the inevitable large increase in energy usage is the energy-neutral systems, which operate with the energy harvested from radio-frequency (RF) transmissions. In this direction, this paper investigates the notion of harvesting the ambient RF signals from an unusual source. Specifically, 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. Two optimal time-switching schemes are also proposed based on maximum sum rate and user-fairness criteria. 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 exploit the surrounding RF signals of the jamming attacks for boosting the amount of harvested energy at the served users. Finally, numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of the derived closed-form expressions through simulations.