Strategic Deployment of Swarm of UAVs for Secure IoT Networks

Security provisioning for low-complex and constrained devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) is exacerbating the concerns for the design of future wireless networks. To unveil the full potential of the sixth generation, it is becoming even more evident that security measurements should be considered at all layers of the network. This work aims to contribute in this direction by investigating the employment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for providing secure transmissions in ground IoT networks. Toward this purpose, it is considered that a set of UAVs acting as aerial base stations provide secure connectivity between the network and multiple ground nodes. Then, the association of IoT nodes, the 3-D positioning of the UAVs, and the power allocation of the UAVs are obtained by leveraging game theoretic and convex optimization-based tools with the goal of increasing the amount of nodes that achieve perfect secrecy in the system. It is shown that the proposed framework obtains better and more efficient secrecy performance over an IoT network than state-of-the-art greedy algorithms for positioning and association.