Robust Trajectory and Communication Design in IRS-Assisted UAV Communication under Malicious Jamming

Abstract

In this paper, we study an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system, where a ground node (GN) communicate with a UAV assisted by intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in the presence of a jammer with imperfect location information. We aim to improve the achievable average rate via the joint robust design of UAV trajectory, IRS passive beamforming and GN's power allocation. However, the formulated optimization problem is challenging to solve due to its non-convexity and coupled variables. To overcome the difficulty, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) based algorithm to solve it sub-optimally by leveraging semidefinite relaxation (SDR), successive convex approximation (SCA), and S-procedure methods. Simulation results show that by deploying the IRS near the GN, our proposed algorithm always improves the uplink achievable average rate significantly compared with the benchmark algorithms, while deploying the IRS nearby the jammer is effective only when the jammer's location is perfectly known.