UAV-enabled Secure Communication Under Marine Imperfect Channel Based on Collaborative Beamforming

Yuqing Liu, Fang Mei, Geng Sun, Hui Kang, Xinrong Guo

Abstract: With the widespread use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the issue of data confidentiality is becoming more and more prominent. For this reason, this paper intends to build a UAV-enabled virtual antenna array (UVAA) and communicate with the BS on a vessel in a maritime environment using cooperative beamforming (CB) techniques. To improve safety, the UAV elements can carry optimal excitation current weights and fly to appropriate locations for CB transmission. However, this will result in more energy consumption. To address several critical issues in UAV communication, a secure communication multi-objective optimization problem (SCMOP) is proposed to simultaneously improve the total secrecy rate, the total maximum sidelobe levels (SLLs), and the total motion energy consumption of the UAVs by jointly optimizing the position and the excitation current weights. Because the SCMOP is non-convexity and NP-hard, we adopt a non-dominated sorting whale optimization algorithm(INSWOA) with chaotic solution initialization, optimal position update based on the sine cosine algorithm (SCA), and adaptive weights to solve the problem. Experiments show that this method can better solve the SCMOP and is superior to some existing standard methods.