Joint Power and Trajectory Design for Physical-Layer Secrecy in the UAV-Aided Mobile Relaying System

Abstract: Mobile relaying is emerged as a promising technique to assist wireless communication, driven by the rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this paper, we study secure transmission in a four-node (source, destination, mobile relay, and eavesdropper) system, wherein we focus on maximizing the secrecy rate via jointly optimizing the relay trajectory and the source/relay transmit power. Nevertheless, due to the coupling of the trajectory designing and the power allocating, the secrecy rate maximization (SRM) problem is intractable to solve. Accordingly, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) approach, wherein the trajectory designing and the power allocating are tackled in an alternating manner. Unfortunately, the trajectory designing is a nonconvex problem, and thus is still hard to solve. To circumvent the nonconvexity, we exploit sequential convex programming (SCP) to derive an iterative algorithm, which is proven to converge to a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) point of the trajectory design problem. The simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the joint power and trajectory design in improving the secrecy throughput.