UAV Swarm-enabled Collaborative Secure Relay Communications with Time-domain Colluding Eavesdropper

TL;DR

This paper proposes a UAV swarm-assisted secure relay system for IoT communications, formulating a complex optimization problem and solving it with an improved algorithm to enhance security, efficiency, and energy savings.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-objective optimization framework for UAV swarm-enabled secure relaying and develops an improved algorithm to solve it effectively.

Findings

The proposed strategy improves secure communication performance.

IMOGOA outperforms existing algorithms in simulations.

The approach effectively counters collusive eavesdropping attacks.

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial relays are practically appealing for assisting Internet of Things (IoT) network. In this work, we aim to utilize the UAV swarm to assist the secure communication between the micro base station (MBS) equipped with the planar array antenna (PAA) and the IoT terminal devices by collaborative beamforming (CB), so as to counteract the effects of collusive eavesdropping attacks in time-domain. Specifically, we formulate a UAV swarm-enabled secure relay multi-objective optimization problem (US2RMOP) for simultaneously maximizing the achievable sum rate of associated IoT terminal devices, minimizing the achievable sum rate of the eavesdropper and minimizing the energy consumption of UAV swarm, by jointly optimizing the excitation current weights of both MBS and UAV swarm, the selection of the UAV receiver, the position of UAVs and user association order of IoT terminal devices. Furthermore, the formulated US2RMOP is proved to be a non-convex, NP-hard and large-scale optimization problem. Therefore, we propose an improved multi-objective grasshopper algorithm (IMOGOA) with some specific designs to address the problem. Simulation results exhibit the effectiveness of the proposed UAV swarm-enabled collaborative secure relay strategy and demonstrate the superiority of IMOGOA.