Joint uplink and downlink scheduling and UAV trajectory design in the presence of multiple unfriendly jammers and eavesdroppers

In this paper, we investigate secure uplink and downlink communications between an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and multiple user equipments (UEs) in the presence of multiple ground-based eavesdroppers (EVs) and unfriendly jammers. In order to guarantee the secure uplink and downlink transmissions, we consider a novel secure transmission scheme, which involves a power splitting based downlink transmission and scheduling of uplink and downlink transmission. Explicitly, we aim to maximize the average secrecy rate (ASR) by optimizing the UAV trajectory, the transmit power of the UAV and UEs, and scheduling of uplink and downlink transmission. Although the formulated problem is nonconvex, we propose an efficient solution by jointly applying the techniques of block coordinate descent and successive convex approximation. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme achieves a better ASR than the benchmark schemes. (c) 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Automated summary

This paper investigates secure uplink and downlink communications between an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and multiple user equipments (UEs) in the presence of multiple ground-based eavesdroppers (EVs) and unfriendly jammers. A novel secure transmission scheme is proposed to maximize the average secrecy rate (ASR) by optimizing the UAV trajectory, transmit power, and transmission scheduling. The proposed scheme achieves a better ASR than the benchmark schemes.