Strategic Deployment of Swarm of UAVs for Secure IoT Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a game-theoretic and convex optimization framework for deploying UAVs as aerial base stations to enhance security in IoT networks, demonstrating superior secrecy performance compared to existing algorithms.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrated approach combining game theory and convex optimization for UAV deployment, association, and power allocation to improve IoT network security.

Findings

Enhanced secrecy performance over state-of-the-art algorithms

Effective UAV positioning and association strategies

Improved security in IoT networks using UAVs

Abstract

Security provisioning for low-complex and constrained devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) is exacerbating the concerns for the design of future wireless networks. To unveil the full potential of the sixth generation (6G), it is becoming even more evident that security measurements should be considered at all layers of the network. This work aims to contribute in this direction by investigating the employment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for providing secure transmissions in ground IoT networks. Toward this purpose, it is considered that a set of UAVs acting as aerial base stations provide secure connectivity between the network and multiple ground nodes. Then, the association of IoT nodes, the 3D positioning of the UAVs and the power allocation of the UAVs are obtained by leveraging game theoretic and convex optimization-based tools with the goal of improving the secrecy of the system. It is shown that the proposed framework obtains better and more efficient secrecy performance over an IoT network than state-of-the-art greedy algorithms for positioning and association.