Physical Layer Security in Millimeter Wave SWIPT UAV-Based Relay Networks

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication is the rising technology for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based relay networks for the abundant bandwidth and short wavelength. However, the secrecy performance of mmWave SWIPT UAV-based relay systems has not been investigated so far. In this paper, we consider secure transmissions of mmWave SWIPT UAV-based relay systems in the presence of multiple independent homogeneous Poisson point process (HPPP) eavesdroppers. Different from most existing works considering a free-space path loss model, the air-to-ground channels are modeled as Nakagami-m small-scale fading, and the effects of blockage to mmWave links on the ground and the 3D antenna gain model are considered. The closed-form expressions of the average achievable secrecy rate and energy coverage probability for amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relay protocols under power splitting (PS) SWIPT policy are derived to reveal the impact of various parameters on system performance. The simulation results show that there is the optimal UAV position to maximize the secrecy rate and the optimal position is closer to the node whose transmit power is relatively small. Furthermore, different carrier frequencies are suitable for different eavesdropping node density.

Keywords

• Millimeter-wave (mmWave)
• UAV relay
• SWIPT
• physical-layer security