RIS-Assisted UAV Secure Communications With Artificial Noise-Aware Trajectory Design Against Multiple Colluding Curious Users

In this paper, we propose a secure unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system with the assistance of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), where UAV trajectory design and artificial noise are incorporated to prevent eavesdropping from multiple colluding curious users. To maximize the secrecy rate of the proposed system, we undertake a joint optimization process that encompasses the trajectory of the UAV, the RIS phase shifts, and the beamforming vectors for both information and artificial noise signals, considering the constraints of the UAV transmit power, UAV flying speed and the phase shifts. To address the non-convex nature of the joint problem and handle the coupling effects of multiple parameters, we conduct the problem decomposition by using the block coordinate descent (BCD) method, combined with an alternating algorithm to optimize the decomposed sub-problems. To further tackle the non-convexity in sub-problems, we apply the successive convex approximation (SCA) method to circumvent the trajectory optimization problem and to optimize the beamformers of information and artificial noise signals, while a majorization-minimization (MM) based scheme is adopted for the RIS phase shifts optimization. Numerical simulation results substantiate the convergence and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm through the comparison with benchmark methods, and our proposed scheme is proven to achieve a significant improvement in average secrecy rate across various conditions.