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Engineering Research Express

Secrecy performance analysis of unmanned aerial vehicles in the presence of interference

Abhijeet Upadhya, Vishal Narain Saxena

Published Feb 23, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract In this research work, we study the secrecy performance of Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the vicinity of an interfering and eavesdropping UAVs. More precisely, firstly a case when the ground user communicates with the intended UAV where two unwanted UAVs operate in the vicinity, has been investigated. It is also considered that the wiretapping UAV also suffers interference from different UAV. The modelling of the UAV communication system considers the impact of small-scale fading, line-of-sight (LoS) probability, altitude and 3D coordinate of all the three involved UAVs. To this end, analytical expression has been derived for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) for the system considering simultaneous effects of eavesdropping and interference. The analysis for secrecy capacity has also been conducted to derive analytical formula. The results are extended to a case when multiple interfering and eavesdropping UAVs function to derive the expression for the SOP. Importantly, the numerical simulation of the derived results show that the effect of eavesdropper can be minimized by placing an interferer in the vicinity of the wiretap source. Moreover, the impact of power transmitted during wiretapping by the eavesdropper appears to be more compared to distance from intended UAV.

DOI
10.1088/2631-8695/ae495c

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Abstract In this research work, we study the secrecy performance of Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the vicinity of an interfering and eavesdropping UAVs. More precisely, firstly a case when the ground user communicates with the intended UAV where two unwanted UAVs operate in the vicinity, has been investigated. It is also considered that the wiretapping UAV also suffers interference from different UAV. The modelling of the UAV communication system considers the impact of small-scale fading, line-of-sight (LoS) probability, altitude and 3D coordinate of all the three involved UAVs. To this end, analytical expression has been derived for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) for the system considering simultaneous effects of eavesdropping and interference. The analysis for secrecy capacity has also been conducted to derive analytical formula. The results are extended to a case when multiple interfering and eavesdropping UAVs function to derive the expression for the SOP. Importantly, the numerical simulation of the derived results show that the effect of eavesdropper can be minimized by placing an interferer in the vicinity of the wiretap source. Moreover, the impact of power transmitted during wiretapping by the eavesdropper appears to be more compared to distance from intended UAV.
In this paper, we study the strictly positive secrecy outage probability (SOP) and the ergodic secrecy capacity of a wiretap unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system where a UAV transmitter (Alice) is trying to send a message to a ground receiver (Bob) while an eavesdropper (Eve) is attempting to eavesdrop on the legitimate communication link. We study the performance of the system in two cases, first, when Eve is on the ground and an Air-to-Ground channel model is adopted between Alice, Bob and Eve. In the second case, Eve is a UAV drone that is located at the same altitude as Alice and the channel between Alice and Eve follows an Air-to-Air channel model. We derive closed form expressions of the SOP and ergodic secrecy capacity for the two scenarios. Simulation results verify the analytical derivations, where the results highlight the importance of the derived secrecy metrics, especially the impact of the distance between Alice and Eve on the overall performance.
In this article, we study the secrecy performance of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted relay communication system, where a ground base station (GBS) intends to send confidential information to the ground legitimate user Bob with the help of a UAV relay in the presence of multiple aerial and ground eavesdroppers. We consider the height-dependent probabilistic line-of-sight and the generalκ\kappaκ-μ\muμshadowed channel fading model in the system. To enhance the secrecy performance, the GBS and UAV relay apply directional beamforming transmission while implementing protection zones around their intended receiving destinations. We then derive the approximate closed-form expressions of the secrecy outage probability (SOP) under different aerial and ground eavesdropperscolluding strategies. To get insights, we also obtain the SOP expression over Rayleigh fading as a special case. After discussing the impacts of transmitting and multiple aerial and ground eavesdropping parameters on the SOP, we show that the optimal altitude of UAV relay exists with the minimal SOP value under different urban environments. We also show that UAV eavesdroppers have a larger effect on the system performance than ground eavesdroppers.
In this paper, we examine the security issue of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided communication systems. We consider the scenario where a source communicates with a legitimate UAV in the presence of a full-duplex eavesdropper. We assume that the full-duplex eavesdropper performs both eavesdropping and malicious jamming simultaneously. In order to safeguard data transmissions against such an eavesdropper, the source transmits artificial noise (AN) signals together with information signals. We adopt the hybrid outage probability as the performance metric, which combines the transmission outage probability and the secrecy outage probability. We derive a compact expression for the hybrid outage probability. Using the derived expression, we determine the optimal power allocation factor between information signals and AN signals that minimizes the hybrid outage probability. In addition, we examine the impact of the operating height of UAV on the secrecy performance, showing that the optimal secrecy performance can be achieved by judiciously controlling the height of UAV.
In this paper, the secrecy performance of the spatial modeling for ground devices with randomly placed eavesdroppers when an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) acted as two hops decode and forward (DF) was investigated. We characterize the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and intercept probability (IP) expressions. Our capacity performance analysis is based on the Rayleigh fading distributions. After analytical results by Monte Carlo simulation, and the Gauss-Chebyshev parameter was selected to yield a close approximation, the results demonstrate the SOP with the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) between UAV and ground users among the eavesdroppers and the IP relationship with the ability to intercept the information of the ground users successfully.
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.
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.