Secrecy Performance Analysis of UAV Transmissions Subject to Eavesdropping and Jamming

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the secrecy performance of UAV communications considering eavesdropping and jamming, deriving analytical expressions for secure connection probability in a stochastic spatial model.

Contribution

It introduces a new approximation for LoS probability and derives the first analytical expression for secure connection probability with randomly distributed eavesdroppers.

Findings

Secure connection probability depends on transmit power, jammer location, and UAV height.

A piecewise LoS probability model outperforms sigmoid-based models.

Analytical trends guide UAV deployment for enhanced security.

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been undergoing fast development for providing broader signal coverage and more extensive surveillance capabilities in military and civilian applications. Due to the broadcast nature of the wireless signal and the openness of the space, UAV eavesdroppers (UEDs) pose a potential threat to ground communications. In this paper, we consider the communications of a legitimate ground link in the presence of friendly jamming and UEDs within a finite area of space. The spatial distribution of the UEDs obeying a uniform binomial point process (BPP) is used to characterize the randomness of the UEDs. The ground link is assumed to experience log-distance path loss and Rayleigh fading, while free space path loss with/without the averaged excess path loss due to the environment is used for the air-to-ground/air-to-air links. A piecewise function is proposed to approximate the line-of-sight (LoS) probability for the air-to-ground links, which provides a better approximation than using the existing sigmoid-based fitting. The analytical expression for the secure connection probability (SCP) of the legitimate ground link in the presence of non-colluding UEDs is derived. The analysis reveals some useful trends in the SCP as a function of the transmit signal to jamming power ratio, the location of the UAV jammer, and the height of UAVs.