Dual-UAV-Enabled Secure Communications: Joint Trajectory Design and User Scheduling

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate a novel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled secure communication system. Two UAVs are applied in this system where one UAV moves around to communicate with multiple users on the ground using orthogonal time-division multiple access while the other UAV in the area jams the eavesdroppers on the ground to protect communications of the desired users. Specifically, we maximize the minimum worst-case secrecy rate among the users within each period by jointly adjusting UAV trajectories and user scheduling under the maximum UAV speed constraints, the UAV return constraints, the UAV collision avoidance constraints, and the discrete binary constraints on user scheduling variables. Since the resulting optimization problem is very difficult to solve due to its highly nonlinear objective function and nonconvex constraints, we first equivalently transform it into a more tractable problem. In particular, the binary constraints are equivalently converted to a number of equality constraints. Then, we develop a novel joint optimization algorithm to handle the converted problem. In order to further improve the secrecy rate performance, we also extend the developed algorithm to the case with multiple jamming UAVs. The simulation results show that the proposed joint optimization algorithm achieves significantly better performance than the conventional algorithms.