Secure Swarm UAV-assisted Communications with Cooperative Friendly Jamming

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cooperative friendly jamming framework for UAV swarms that enhances secure communications by optimizing energy harvesting and relay strategies, validated through theoretical analysis and simulations.

Contribution

It develops a novel time-switching relaying protocol for UAV swarms with energy harvesting and jamming, along with analytical SOP derivation for security performance evaluation.

Findings

The proposed framework improves secrecy outage probability compared to conventional systems.

Analytical SOP expressions match simulation results, validating the theoretical model.

Optimization insights for UAV placement and energy harvesting enhance secure communication performance.

Abstract

This article proposes a cooperative friendly jamming framework for swarm unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying networks with wireless energy harvesting. Due to the limited energy of the UAVs, we develop a collaborative time-switching relaying protocol which allows the UAVs to collaborate to harvest wireless energy, relay information, and jam the eavesdropper. To evaluate the secrecy rate, we derive the secrecy outage probability (SOP) for two popular detection techniques at the eavesdropper, i.e., selection combining and maximum-ratio combining. Monte Carlo simulations are then used to validate the theoretical SOP derivation and to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of SOP as compared with the conventional amplify-and-forward relaying system. Using the derived SOP, one can obtain engineering insights to optimize the energy harvesting time and the number of UAVs in the swarm to achieve a given secrecy protection level. The analytical SOP derived in this work can also be helpful in future UAV secure-communications optimizations (e.g., trajectory, locations of UAVs). As an example, we present a case study to find the optimal corridor to locate the swarm so as to minimize the system SOP.