Resource and Trajectory Optimization for UAV-Relay-Assisted Secure Maritime MEC

Abstract

With the evolutional development of maritime networks, the explosive growth of maritime data has put forward elevated demands for the computing capabilities of maritime devices (MDs). Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is able to alleviate the computing pressure of MDs by forwarding the computing tasks to the edge server on the coast. However, UAV relaying introduces a significant security challenge due to the vulnerability of line-of-sight (LoS) communication channels, which can be exploited for eavesdropping on computing tasks. In this paper, an efficient secure communication scheme is proposed for UAV-relay-assisted maritime mobile edge computing (MEC) with a flying eavesdropper. The secure computing capacity of MDs is maximized by jointly optimizing the transmit power, time slot allocation factor, computation optimization and UAV trajectory. Due to multi-variable coupling, the formulated optimization problem (OP) is non-convex. We first transform OP by introducing auxiliary variables. Then, the transformed OP is decomposed and solved in an iterative manner by applying block coordinate descent (BCD) and successive convex approximation (SCA). Numerical results show that the secure computing capability of the UAV-relay-assisted maritime MEC system of proposed secure communication scheme can be effectively improved compared with benchmarks.