No Arabic abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be utilized as aerial base stations to provide communication service for remote mobile users due to their high mobility and flexible deployment. However, the line-of-sight (LoS) wireless links are vulnerable to be intercepted by the eavesdropper (Eve), which presents a major challenge for UAV-aided communications. In this paper, we propose a latency-minimized transmission scheme for satisfying legitimate users (LUs) content requests securely against Eve. By leveraging physical-layer security (PLS) techniques, we formulate a transmission latency minimization problem by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and user association. The resulting problem is a mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP), which is known to be NP hard. Furthermore, the dimension of optimization variables is indeterminate, which again makes our problem very challenging. To efficiently address this, we utilize bisection to search for the minimum transmission delay and introduce a variational penalty method to address the associated subproblem via an inexact block coordinate descent approach. Moreover, we present a characterization for the optimal solution. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed design.
In this letter, we study the secure communication problem in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled networks aided by an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) from the physical-layer security perspective. Specifically, the IRS is deployed to assist the wireless transmission from the UAV to the ground user in the presence of an eavesdropper. The objective of this work is to maximize the secrecy rate by jointly optimizing the phase shifts at the IRS as well as the transmit power and location of the UAV. However, the formulated problem is difficult to solve directly due to the non-linear and non-convex objective function and constraints. By invoking fractional programming and successive convex approximation techniques, the original problem is decomposed into three subproblems, which are then transformed into convex ones. Next, a low-complexity alternating algorithm is proposed to solve the challenging non-convex problem effectively, where the closed-form expressions for transmit power and phase shifts are obtained at each iteration. Simulations results demonstrate that the designed algorithm for IRS-aided UAV communications can achieve higher secrecy rate than benchmarks.
Cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a promising solution to provide uniform good performance for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. In this paper, we propose the UAV communication with wireless power transfer (WPT) aided CF massive MIMO systems, where the harvested energy (HE) from the downlink WPT is used to support both uplink data and pilot transmission. We derive novel closed-form downlink HE and uplink spectral efficiency (SE) expressions that take hardware impairments of UAV into account. UAV communications with current small cell (SC) and cellular massive MIMO enabled WPT systems are also considered for comparison. It is significant to show that CF massive MIMO achieves two and five times higher 95%-likely uplink SE than the ones of SC and cellular massive MIMO, respectively. Besides, the large-scale fading decoding receiver cooperation can reduce the interference of the terrestrial user. Moreover, the maximum SE can be achieved by changing the time-splitting fraction. We prove that the optimal time-splitting fraction for maximum SE is determined by the number of antennas, altitude and hardware quality factor of UAVs. Furthermore, we propose three UAV trajectory design schemes to improve the SE. It is interesting that the angle search scheme performs best than both AP search and line path schemes. Finally, simulation results are presented to validate the accuracy of our expressions.
We consider a cellular network deployment where UAV-to-UAV (U2U) transmit-receive pairs share the same spectrum with the uplink (UL) of cellular ground users (GUEs). For this setup, we focus on analyzing and comparing the performance of two spectrum sharing mechanisms: (i) underlay, where the same time-frequency resources may be accessed by both UAVs and GUEs, resulting in mutual interference, and (ii)overlay, where the available resources are divided into orthogonal portions for U2U and GUE communications. We evaluate the coverage probability and rate of both link types and their interplay to identify the best spectrum sharing strategy. We do so through an analytical framework that embraces realistic height-dependent channel models, antenna patterns, and practical power control mechanisms. For the underlay, we find that although the presence of U2U direct communications may worsen the uplink performance of GUEs, such effect is limited as base stations receive the power-constrained UAV signals through their antenna sidelobes. In spite of this, our results lead us to conclude that in urban scenarios with a large number of UAV pairs, adopting an overlay spectrum sharing seems the most suitable approach for maintaining a minimum guaranteed rate for UAVs and a high GUE UL performance.
In this paper, we propose a physical layer security scheme that exploits a novel index modulation (IM) technique for coordinate interleaved orthogonal designs (CIOD). Utilizing the diversity gain of CIOD transmission, the proposed scheme, named CIOD-IM, provides an improved spectral efficiency by means of IM. In order to provide a satisfactory secrecy rate, we design a particular artificial noise matrix, which does not affect the performance of the legitimate receiver, while deteriorating the performance of the eavesdropper. We derive expressions of the ergodic secrecy rate and the theoretical bit error rate upper bound. In addition, we analyze the case of imperfect channel estimation by taking practical concerns into consideration. It is shown via computer simulations that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing IM-based schemes and might be a candidate for future secure communication systems.
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising solution to build a programmable wireless environment for future communication systems, in which the reflector elements steer the incident signal in fully customizable ways by passive beamforming. In this paper, an IRS-aided secure spatial modulation (SM) is proposed, where the IRS perform passive beamforming and information transfer simultaneously by adjusting the on-off states of the reflecting elements. We formulate an optimization problem to maximize the average secrecy rate (SR) by jointly optimizing the passive beamforming at IRS and the transmit power at transmitter under the consideration that the direct pathes channels from transmitter to receivers are obstructed by obstacles. As the expression of SR is complex, we derive a newly fitting expression (NASR) for the expression of traditional approximate SR (TASR), which has simpler closed-form and more convenient for subsequent optimization. Based on the above two fitting expressions, three beamforming methods, called maximizing NASR via successive convex approximation (Max-NASR-SCA), maximizing NASR via dual ascent (Max-NASR-DA) and maximizing TASR via semi-definite relaxation (Max-TASR-SDR) are proposed to improve the SR performance. Additionally, two transmit power design (TPD) methods are proposed based on the above two approximate SR expressions, called Max-NASR-TPD and Max-TASR-TPD. Simulation results show that the proposed Max-NASR-DA and Max-NASR-SCA IRS beamformers harvest substantial SR performance gains over Max-TASR-SDR. For TPD, the proposed Max-NASR-TPD performs better than Max-TASR-TPD. Particularly, the Max-NASR-TPD has a closed-form solution.