Improving PHY-Security of UAV-Enabled Transmission with Wireless Energy Harvesting: Robust Trajectory Design and Communications Resource Allocation

TL;DR

This paper proposes robust trajectory and resource allocation strategies for UAV-assisted secure communication systems with wireless energy harvesting, demonstrating significant secrecy performance improvements over existing methods.

Contribution

It introduces two transmission schemes for UAV-based secure communication with energy harvesting, and develops an efficient algorithm for joint optimization of UAV trajectories and power allocation.

Findings

FUJ scheme outperforms GJT in secrecy rate

Joint optimization enhances system security and efficiency

Numerical results validate the proposed methods' effectiveness

Abstract

In this paper, we consider an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted communications system, including two cooperative UAVs, a wireless-powered ground destination node leveraging simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technique, and a terrestrial passive eavesdropper. One UAV delivers confidential information to destination and the other sends jamming signals to against eavesdropping and assist destination with energy harvesting. Assuming UAVs have partial information about eavesdropper's location, we propose two transmission schemes: friendly UAV jamming (FUJ) and Gaussian jamming transmission (GJT) for the cases when jamming signals are known and unknown a priori at destination, respectively. Then, we formulate an average secrecy rate maximization problem to jointly optimize the transmission power and trajectory of UAVs, and the power splitting ratio of destination. Being non-convex and hence difficult to solve the formulated problem, we propose a computationally efficient iterative algorithm based on block coordinate descent and successive convex approximation to obtain a suboptimal solution. Finally, numerical results are provided to substantiate the effectiveness of our proposed multiple-UAV schemes, compared to other existing benchmarks. Specifically, we find that the FUJ demonstrates significant secrecy performance improvement in terms of the optimal instantaneous and average secrecy rate compared to the GJT and the conventional single-UAV counterpart.