Secure Communication Optimization in NOMA Systems with UAV-mounted STAR-RIS

Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (STAR-RISs), as a revolutionary technique, can boost transmission security by controlling unfavorable environments for signal eavesdropping and reducing interference. Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with STAR-RISs has generated considerable interest due to its enhanced deployment flexibility. However, developing secure communication capabilities using flying STAR-RIS remains an open issue. Therefore, this work investigates the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) maximization problem for the uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems, where the UAV-mounted STAR-RIS is employed against the eavesdroppers. Specifically, we consider the joint optimization of the power control, the transmission/reflection coefficients, and the UAV/STAR-RIS’s placement for static and mobile scenarios. The problems are also subject to the minimum data rate requirements and the safety flight region. To tackle the intractable problems, we first adopt the iterative-based method to solve the problem under the static scenario. After that, we invoke the fractional programming and successive convex approximation methods to get the power control scheme, the semidefinite relaxation method to get the transmission/reflection (T/R) coefficients design, and the search-based method to obtain the UAV/STAR-RIS position. Extending to the mobile scenario, we adopt the double deep Q-network (DDQN) algorithm to learn the online UAV trajectory design policy from a long-term perspective. Numerical results unveil that: 1) the proposed iterative-based joint optimization algorithm for static scenarios achieves a near-optimal solution; 2) the NOMA communications aided by the UAV-mounted STAR-RIS achieve significant SEE gain over the conventional reflection-only RIS and the fixed STAR-RIS cases; 3) the DDQN-based algorithm for mobile scenario achieves a near-optimal solution and obtains a valuable performance gain over the short-sighted greedy algorithm.