Exploiting UAV‐emitted jamming to improve physical‐layer security: A 3D trajectory control perspective

Abstract

Abstract This study investigates the physical‐layer security of a terrestrial communication system in the presence of potential unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) eavesdroppers (UEDs). Due to the line‐of‐sight channels of ground‐to‐air links and the broadcast characteristics of wireless channels, the UEDs have a better chance to eavesdrop terrestrial communication systems compared with the conventional ground eavesdroppers. It indicates that the emerging of UEDs brings new challenges to secure transmissions in terrestrial communication systems. In this study, a UAV is recruited to wisely jam the UEDs by adopting a dynamic three‐dimensional (3D) trajectory, in order to protect the legitimate transmission. To maximally improve the average secrecy rate, the joint optimization of the 3D trajectory of the UAV jammer and legitimate user scheduling as a non‐convex mixed‐integer optimization problem is formulated. To efficiently solve such a challenging problem, a novel enhanced genetic algorithm (EGA), where a combined encoding method and a fitness‐based crossover method are developed to improve the convergence performance, is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed EGA in terms of the average secrecy rate.

Keywords

• Electromagnetic compatibility and interference
• Radio links and equipment
• Optimisation techniques
• Aerospace control
• Mobile robots
• Telerobotics