Energy-efficient joint UAV secure communication and 3D trajectory optimization assisted by reconfigurable intelligent surfaces in the presence of eavesdroppers

Abstract

We consider a scenario where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a typical unmanned aerial system (UAS), transmits confidential data to a moving ground target in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. Multiple friendly reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) help to secure the UAV-target communication and improve the energy efficiency of the UAV. We formulate an optimization problem to minimize the energy consumption of the UAV, subject to the mobility constraint of the UAV and that the achievable secrecy rate at the target is over a given threshold. We present an online planning method following the framework of model predictive control (MPC) to jointly optimize the motion of the UAV and the configurations of the RISs. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated via computer simulations.