UAV-Enabled Secure Communications via Collaborative Beamforming With Imperfect Eavesdropper Information

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are playing a pivotal role in wireless networks due to their high mobility and on-demand deployment advantages. However, the UAV-enabled communications are susceptible to be wiretapped by eavesdroppers due to the strong line-of-sight (LoS) dominated air-ground channel. In this paper, we consider a UAV-enabled secure communication scenario, in which a group of UAVs form a UAV-enabled virtual antenna array (UVAA) to transmit information towards the remote base stations (BSs) via collaborative beamforming (CB), while multiple known and unknown eavesdroppers aiming to wiretap the information. Specifically, a secure communication multi-objective optimization problem (SCMOP) is formulated to achieve the maximization of the worst-case secrecy rate, the minimization of the maximum sidelobe level (SLL) as well as the minimization of the flight energy consumption of UAVs by obtaining optimal locations and excitation current weights concerning the UAVs as well as determining an optimal receiver BS that can achieve superior communication performance. To solve the formulated SCMOP which is demonstrated to be non-convex and NP-hard, an improved multi-objective salp swarm algorithm (IMSSA) with several specific operating factors is proposed. Simulations results demonstrate that the proposed IMSSA can deal with the formulated SCMOP effectively and outperforms other benchmark strategies. Moreover, the multi-hop relay is introduced to verify the reasonability of the UVAA system, and two benchmark schemes of the formulated SCMOP are introduced to demonstrate the necessity of the formulated SCMOP. In addition, the performance of the UVAA system under certain unexpected circumstances is estimated. Finally, experimental implementation is conducted by using a Raspberry Pi and the results demonstrate the practicality of the proposed CB-based secure communication approach in real-world scenarios.