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IEEE Internet of Things Journal

Safeguarding UAV IoT Communication Systems Against Randomly Located Eavesdroppers

Hongjiang Lei, Di Wang, Ki‐Hong Park, Imran Shafique Ansari, Jing Jiang, Gaofeng Pan, Mohamed‐Slim Alouini

Published Nov 25, 2019• 78 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will be extensively utilized in various Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios due to their flexible mobility and rapid on-demand deployment. It becomes necessary and urgent to investigate the secrecy performance of the UAV IoT communication systems because of the open characteristics of wireless channels. In this article, the physical layer security of UAV IoT communication systems is studied, in which a ground IoT device transmits some confidential messages to a UAV hovering in the air, while a random number of eavesdroppers are randomly positioned around the ground source. The ground-to-air channel is assumed to experience Rician fading for the case of line-of-sight propagation and Rayleigh fading for the case of nonline-of-sight propagation, respectively. In addition, in order to improve the security of the system, we also investigate the secrecy performance of the UAV IoT system with a friendly UAV that generates jamming signals to distract the eavesdroppers. Utilizing the stochastic geometry theory, the cumulative distribution functions for the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio of the main and eavesdropping links are derived, and then the analytical expressions of the secrecy outage probability and the average secrecy rate are obtained. Finally, the accuracy of the analytical results is verified by Monte Carlo simulation.

DOI
10.1109/jiot.2019.2953903

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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will be extensively utilized in various Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios due to their flexible mobility and rapid on-demand deployment. It becomes necessary and urgent to investigate the secrecy performance of the UAV IoT communication systems because of the open characteristics of wireless channels. In this article, the physical layer security of UAV IoT communication systems is studied, in which a ground IoT device transmits some confidential messages to a UAV hovering in the air, while a random number of eavesdroppers are randomly positioned around the ground source. The ground-to-air channel is assumed to experience Rician fading for the case of line-of-sight propagation and Rayleigh fading for the case of nonline-of-sight propagation, respectively. In addition, in order to improve the security of the system, we also investigate the secrecy performance of the UAV IoT system with a friendly UAV that generates jamming signals to distract the eavesdroppers. Utilizing the stochastic geometry theory, the cumulative distribution functions for the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio of the main and eavesdropping links are derived, and then the analytical expressions of the secrecy outage probability and the average secrecy rate are obtained. Finally, the accuracy of the analytical results is verified by Monte Carlo simulation.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been extensively utilized in various scenarios due to their flexible mobility and rapid on-demand deployment. It becomes necessary and urgent to examine the secrecy performance of the UAV communication systems due to the open characteristics of the transmission technologies employed in UAV systems. In this paper, we investigate the physical layer security of the UAV communication system, in which the ground base station sends secret messages to the UAV hovering in the air, while a random number of eavesdroppers are randomly located around the ground base station. Using the Poisson point process theory, we obtain the exact and approximate expressions of the cumulative distribution function for the signal-to-noise ratio of the ground-to-air link, and then the analytical expressions of the secrecy outage probability and the average secrecy rate are derived. Finally, the accuracy of the analytical results is validated by Monte Carlo simulation.
Owing to flexible management and low overhead, wireless physical layer security (PLS) has been applied to support many critical applications (e.g., data dissemination) of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-based mobile communication networks in emergency scenarios. Although the impact of static network scenarios or receiver mobility on PLS has been well studied, there is no much work that studies the impact of UAV-based transmitter mobility on PLS. To fill this gap, in this paper, we investigate PLS of a scenario, where a random mobile UAV-based transmitter transmits information to a static ground entity under Rayleigh fading channel. More specifically, we consider a communication system, in which a mobile UAV hovers over a region to collect information and then disseminates this information to a static ground network entity in a confidential manner under the presence of an eavesdropper. Because of popularity and practicality, the UAV is assumed to hover following the random way point (RWP) mobility model. We investigate the secrecy characteristics of the UAV under steady running state in terms of ergodic secrecy capacity (ESC), positive secrecy capacity probability (PSCP) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) for the communication between the UAV and the receiver. We then investigate the secrecy performance of the proposed system while considering the pause time of the RWP mobility model adopted by the UAV. We further extend our proposed theoretical model to other realistic scenarios, including the presence of multiple cooperative and non-cooperative eavesdroppers, and study the PSCP and SOP metrics of the corresponding system. Furthermore, we propose three types of secrecy improvement strategies for the considered communication model. We strike a good trade-off between the secrecy improvement and transmit outage probability. Extensive simulations have been conducted to validate our theoretical analysis as well as the effectiveness of the proposed secrecy improvement strategies.
With the notable interest in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-to-ground communications, new fading channel models that take into account the effects of shadowing have been proposed for beyond 5G networks. Guaranteeing physical layer security of the UAV-to-ground channels is essential for the transmission of confidential messages in the presence of an eavesdropper. In this paper, we examine physical layer security metrics, such as the average secrecy capacity, the secrecy outage probability, and the probability of strictly positive secrecy capacity, in UAV-to-ground communications with shadowing. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to verify the analytical expressions. Finally, the effect of the fading parameters on the system performance is studied.
In this letter, we investigate the secrecy performance of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-to-UAV system, where a UAV acts as the source (S{S}S) transmitting information to a legitimate UAV receiver while a group of UAVs trying to eavesdrop the information delivery betweenS{S}Sand legitimate UAV receiver. The locations of the legitimate UAV receiver and the eavesdropping UAVs are randomly distributed in the coverage space ofS{S}S. We first characterize the statistical characteristics of the signal-to-noise ratio overS{S}Sto the legitimate UAV receiver links; and then the closed-form analytical expressions for secrecy outage probability and the average secrecy capacity have also been derived accordingly. Finally, Monte-Carlo simulations are carried out to verify our proposed analytical models.
The broadcast nature of air-to-ground line-of-sight (LoS) wireless channel imposes a great challenge in secure unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. To address this issue, this paper investigates UAV-ground communications from the physical-layer security perspective. Specifically, the investigated scenario includes a UAV serving as the base station (BS) that transmits confidential signals to a legitimate ground user, and there are multiple eavesdroppers on the ground with unknown position information. To further enhance the secrecy performance of the UAV-ground communications, an idle UAV can be employed to serve as a friendly jammer, which can transmit jamming signals to confuse the eavesdroppers. In our proposed strategy, the flying trajectory and the transmit power for both the UAVs are jointly optimized by maximizing the worst-case secrecy rate (WCSR) of the system. Considering the intractability of the formulated non-convex problem, we further provide a block coordinate descent-based iterative optimization method. Simulations verify that our proposed algorithm can significantly improve the average WCSR in comparison with the existing works.
In this paper, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to ground communication system with spatially random eavesdroppers account on both ground and airspace is considered. UAV tries to transmit information to a legitimate receiver on the ground while a group of eavesdroppers on the ground and another group of eavesdropping UAVs in the airspace try to overhear the delivered information. The locations of all terminals are randomly distributed in the coverage space of the source UAV. The statistical characteristics of the received signal-to-noise ratio at all terminals considering two kinds of communication environment are characterized. The analytical expressions for secrecy outage probability are derived. Finally, simulation is carried out to verify the correctness of our analytical model.