UAV-Assisted Secure Communications in Terrestrial Cognitive Radio Networks: Joint Power Control and 3D Trajectory Optimization

This paper considers secure communications for an underlay cognitive radio network (CRN) in the presence of an external eavesdropper (Eve). The secrecy performance of CRNs is usually limited by the primary receiver’s interference power constraint. To overcome this issue, we propose to use an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a friendly jammer to interfere Eve in decoding the confidential message from the secondary transmitter (ST). Our goal is to jointly optimize the transmit power and UAV’s trajectory in the three-dimensional (3D) space to maximize the average achievable secrecy rate of the secondary system. The formulated optimization problem is nonconvex due to the nonconvexity of the objective and nonconvexity of constraints, which is very challenging to solve. To
obtain a suboptimal but efficient solution to the problem, we first transform the original problem into a more tractable form and develop an iterative algorithm for its solution by leveraging the inner approximation framework. We further extend the proposed algorithm to the case of imperfect location information of Eve, where the average worst-case secrecy rate is considered as the objective function. Extensive numerical results are provided to demonstrate the merits of the proposed algorithms over existing approaches.