Dual-UAV Enabled Secure Data Collection With Propulsion Limitation

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely utilized to improve the end-to-end performance of wireless communications. However, its line-of-sight makes UAV communication vulnerable to malicious eavesdroppers. In this paper, we propose two cooperative dual-UAV enabled secure data collection schemes to ensure security, with the practical propulsion energy consumption considered. We first maximize the worst-case average secrecy rate with the average propulsion power limitation, where the scheduling, the transmit power, the trajectory and the velocity of the two UAVs are jointly optimized. To solve the non-convex multivariable problem, we propose an iterative algorithm based on block coordinate descent and successive convex approximation. To further save the on-board energy and prolong the flight time, we then maximize the secrecy energy efficiency of UAV data collection, which is a fractional and mixed integer nonlinear programming problem. Based on the Dinkelbach method, we transform the objective function into an integral expression and propose an iterative algorithm to obtain a suboptimal solution to secrecy energy efficiency maximization. Numerical results show that the average secrecy rate is maximized in the first scheme with propulsion limitation, while in the second scheme, the secrecy energy efficiency is maximized with the optimal velocity to save propulsion power and improve secrecy rate simultaneously.