UAV-Involved Wireless Physical-Layer Secure Communications: Overview and Research Directions

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in physical-layer security for UAV-based wireless communications, highlighting design strategies, optimization techniques, and future research directions for enhancing security in 5G networks.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of UAV-involved secure communication schemes and discusses optimization of UAV characteristics for improved physical-layer security.

Findings

UAVs can enhance physical-layer security through cooperative strategies.

Design of secure transmission schemes varies with UAV roles.

Future research directions include advanced optimization and security protocols.

Abstract

Due to their flexible deployment and on-demand mobility, small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are anticipated to be involved in widespread communication applications in the forthcoming fifth-generation (5G) networks. However, the confidentiality of UAV communication applications is vulnerable to security threats due to the broadcast nature and dominant line-of-sight (LoS) channel conditions, and physical-layer security (PLS) technique can be applied for secrecy performance enhancement in such a context. On the other hand, it is also promising to exploit UAVs to cooperatively protect secure communications. This article provides an overview of the recent research efforts on UAV-involved secure communications at the physical layer. We focus on the design of secure transmission schemes according to different roles of UAVs and the optimization of introduced degrees of freedom (DoFs) by the unique characteristics of UAVs. We also propose some future research directions on this topic.