Cooperative Jamming for Secure UAV-Enabled Mobile Relay System

Abstract

Due to the air-to-ground line-of-sight communication links, it is challenging to deal with the security threats in the wireless system with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) integrated. In a UAV-enabled mobile relay system, the paper proposes a novel cooperative communication scheme from a physical layer security perspective to address the security issue. Specifically, in a mobile relay system where a UAV relay is employed to forward confidential information between two ground users, an eavesdropper exists on the ground wiretapping the relay UAV. To enhance the security performance of the system, we introduce a friendly UAV jammer transmitting interference signals and confusing the eavesdropper. A secrecy rate maximization problem is then formulated, subject to mobility constraints, power constraints on both UAVs and the information-causality constraint on the relay UAV. To solve the non-convex optimization problem with closely coupled variables, we decouple the problem into more tractable subproblems. An iterative algorithm is thus proposed to optimize the transmit power and flight trajectory of both UAVs alternately via the update-rate-assisted block coordinate descent and successive convex approximation techniques. Simulation results demonstrate that proposed cooperative design can significantly improve the secrecy rate of the UAV-enabled mobile relay system compared to benchmark schemes.