Trajectory Design and Communication Resources Allocation for Wireless Powered Secure UAV Communication Systems

Abstract

Benefiting from the intrinsic convenience, flexibility, low cost, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are envisioned to play an important role in future wireless communication systems. However, the limited on-board battery capacities and the broadcast characteristic of air-to-ground wireless channels bring some nonnegligible challenges on achieving secure UAV communications. To tackle these challenges, we propose to apply both the wireless power transfer and physical layer security techniques in a UAV communication system. We investigate the secrecy rate maximization problem by jointly optimizing the wireless charging duration, the trajectory, and transmit power of the UAV, subject to limited battery capacity, maximum flying speed, and energy-harvesting causal constraints. To solve this nonconvex problem, we first transform this problem into an equivalent problem with a smooth objective function, and then propose a low-complexity trajectory design and communication resources allocation algorithm for settling the reformulated problem via employing alternating optimization and SCP. Specifically, the reformulated problem is decomposed into three independent subproblems: the wireless charging duration optimization, the transmit power control, and the trajectory design of the UAV. Subsequently, we iteratively solve one of these three subproblems, while the others being fixed until the proposed algorithm converges. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly enhance the secrecy rate relative to the benchmark algorithms in absence of rechargeable battery or with fixed trajectory and transmit power.