On the Dilemma of Reliability or Security in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Communications Assisted by Energy Harvesting Relaying

In this study, we investigate the trade-off between reliability and security in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications systems, considering a UAV-terrestrial network aided by a relay powered by a dedicated power beacon. For this system, we derive the outage probability (OP) under both exact and approximate frameworks and compute the approximations in the closed-form expressions. For the security aspect, we also derive the intercept probability (IP) under exact and approximated frameworks. To minimize the IP, a friendly jamming technique is employed whereby the power beacon constantly broadcasts artificial noise (AN) toward an eavesdropper. Based on the derived mathematical framework, we then formulate a bi-objective optimization problem by jointly minimizing the OP and IP with respect to the UAV’s position and the time-switching (TS) ratio. A suitable algorithm, named non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm version II (NSGA-II), is deployed to obtain the sub-optimal solution. Finally, numerical results are presented to verify the accuracy of the proposed mathematical framework and the superiority of jointly minimizing both the OP and IP using only the channel statistics.