Secrecy Energy-Efficient UAV Communication via Trajectory Design and Power Control

This paper investigates the problem of maximizing the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) for unmanned aerial vehicle- (UAV-) to-ground wireless communication system, in which a fixed-wing UAV tries to transmit covert information to a terrestrial legitimate destination receiver with multiple terrestrial eavesdroppers. In particular, we intend to maximize the worst-case SEE of UAV by jointly optimizing UAV’s flight trajectory and transmit power over a finite flight period. However, the formulated problem is challenging to solve because of its large-scale nonconvexity. For efficiently solving this problem, we first decouple the above optimization problem into two subproblems and then propose an alternating iterative algorithm by adopting block coordinate descent method and Dinkelbach’s algorithm as well as successive convex approximation technique to seek a suboptimal solution. For the sake of performance comparison, two benchmark schemes, the secrecy rate maximization (SRM) scheme and constrained energy minimization (CEM) scheme are considered to obtain more useful insights. Finally, simulation results are executed to verify that our proposed SEE maximization (SEEM) algorithm is superior to two benchmark schemes for the UAV-ground communication system.