Joint trajectory design and power allocation for unmanned aerial vehicles aided secure transmission in the presence of no‐fly zone

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely considered as key enablers for future wireless networks due to their advantages, such as high mobility and flexible deployment. In this paper, the UAV assisted secure communication system is investigated, where the UAV is deployed as the mobile jammer to prevent the eavesdropper from overhearing the confidential message. With the objective of maximizing the secrecy rate, a joint optimization problem involving the trajectory and transmit power of UAV, as well as the transmit power of source node is formulated. Moreover, the effects of Non‐Fly Zone (NFZ) and imperfect estimation on the location of eavesdropper are also taken into consideration. As the original problem is hardly trackable, the worst case secrecy rate (WCSR) assumption is first employed to bypass the uncertainty brought by the estimation error. Then a block coordinate descent (BCD) based algorithm is proposed to decompose the problem into three sub‐ones, where the trajectory of UAV, the transmit power of UAV and the transmit power of source can be obtained in an iterative manner. Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm can improve the secrecy performance significantly. In addition, the robustness of the proposed algorithm under the estimation error can also be verified.