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International Conference on Computer and Automation Engineering

A Q-learning based Method f or Secure UAV Communication against Malicious Eavesdropping

Jian Zhang

Published Mar 25, 2022• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Due to the advantages such as excellent mobility, low-cost, on-demand deployment, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to play a significant role in the future wireless communication systems. One of the necessary and urgent problems is the physical layer security of this wireless communication system. Specifically, under the open nature of the UAV wireless channels, how to convey confidential information reliably in a coexistence environment with eavesdroppers. In this paper, we investigate a Q-learning based security scheme to maximize the average secrecy rate (ASR) against intentional or unintentional eavesdropping. Simulation results show comparable disguising performances compared with the benchmark method.

DOI
10.1109/iccae55086.2022.9762433

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Due to the advantages such as excellent mobility, low-cost, on-demand deployment, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to play a significant role in the future wireless communication systems. One of the necessary and urgent problems is the physical layer security of this wireless communication system. Specifically, under the open nature of the UAV wireless channels, how to convey confidential information reliably in a coexistence environment with eavesdroppers. In this paper, we investigate a Q-learning based security scheme to maximize the average secrecy rate (ASR) against intentional or unintentional eavesdropping. Simulation results show comparable disguising performances compared with the benchmark method.
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.
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.
Due to its high mobility and flexible deployment, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is drawing unprecedented interest in both military and civil applications to enable agile wireless communications and provide ubiquitous connectivity. Mainly operating in an open environment, UAV communications can benefit from dominant line-of-sight links; however, it on the other hand renders the UAVs more vulnerable to malicious eavesdropping or jamming attacks. Recently, physical layer security (PLS), which exploits the inherent randomness of the wireless channels for secure communications, has been introduced to UAV systems as an important complement to the conventional cryptography-based approaches. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on the current achievements of the UAV-aided wireless communications is conducted from the PLS perspective. We first introduce the basic concepts of UAV communications including the typical static/mobile deployment scenarios, the unique characteristics of air-to-ground channels, as well as various roles that a UAV may act when PLS is concerned. Then, we introduce the widely used secrecy performance metrics and start by reviewing the secrecy performance analysis and enhancing techniques for statically deployed UAV systems, and extend the discussion to a more general scenario where the UAVs' mobility is further exploited. For both cases, respectively, we summarize the commonly adopted methodologies in the corresponding analysis and design, then describe important works in the literature in detail. Finally, potential research directions and challenges are discussed to provide an outlook for future works in the area of UAV-PLS in 5G and beyond networks.
Due to their flexible deployment and on-demand mobility, small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are anticipated to be involved in widespread communication applications in the forthcoming fifth-generation networks. However, the confidentiality of UAV communication applications is vulnerable to security threats due to the broadcast nature and dominant line-of-sight channel conditions, and physical-layer security can be applied for secrecy performance enhancement in such a context. On the other hand, it is also promising to exploit UAVs to cooperatively protect secure communications. This article provides an overview of the recent research efforts on UAV-involved secure communications at the physical layer. We focus on the design of secure transmission schemes according to different roles of UAVs and the optimization of introduced degrees of freedom by the unique characteristics of UAVs. We also propose some future research directions on this topic.
This paper investigates an unmanned ariel vehicle (UAV)-enabled secure communication system, where an UAV sends confidential information to legitimate ground users (LGUs) in the presence of a ground eavesdropper (Eve). In order to improve the comprehensive security performance of UAV network communication, a two-way training-based discriminatory channel estimation (DCE) scheme focusing on physical layer security (PLS) is proposed. We derive the closed-form expression of the average secrecy rate (ASR) and the minimum normalized mean square error (NMSE). On the premise of ensuring the effectiveness of channel estimation errors, we aim to maximize the ASR of the system, by jointly optimizing the UAV’s flight trajectory and power allocation. Due to the intractability of the formulated problem, block coordinate descent (BCD) and successive convex approximation (SCA) techniques are applied to solve the problem. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme can enhance the security of the UAV communication. Moreover, the relationship between system ASR and UAV power allocation is revealed.
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.