Weighted Secrecy Coverage Analysis and the Impact of Friendly Jamming over UAV-Enabled Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how UAV-based friendly jamming can enhance wireless secrecy in 5G networks, introducing a new weighted metric for optimal UAV jammer deployment and evaluating its effectiveness through derived formulas and simulations.

Contribution

It proposes a novel Weighted Secrecy Coverage metric and provides analytical and simulation-based insights into optimal UAV jammer deployment for improved secrecy.

Findings

Balanced power allocation improves secrecy performance.

Symmetrical UAV positioning enhances jamming effectiveness.

An optimal UAV height exists for maximizing secrecy coverage.

Abstract

In 5G and beyond networks, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are an attractive solution to enhance the secrecy of a wireless systems by exploiting their predominant LOS links and spacial manoeuvrability to introduce a friendly jamming. In this work, we investigate the impact of two cooperative UAV-based jammers on the secrecy performance of a ground wireless wiretap channel by considering secrecy-area related metrics, the jamming coverage and jamming efficiency. Moreover, we propose a hybrid metric, the so-called Weighted Secrecy Coverage (WSC) that can be used as a metric for gaining insights on the optimal deployments of the UAV jammers to provide the best exploration of jamming signals. For evaluating these metrics, we derive a closed-form position-based metric, the secrecy improvement, and propose an analogous computationally simpler metric. Our simulations show that a balanced power allocation between the two UAVs leads to the best performances, as well as a symmetrical positioning behind the line of sight between the legitimate transmitter and receiver. Moreover, there exist an optimal UAV height for the jammers. Finally, we propose a sub-optimal and simpler problem for the maximisation of the WSC.