Gridded UAV Swarm for Secrecy Rate Maximization with Unknown Eavesdropper

Abstract: This paper considers grid formation of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm for maximizing the secrecy rate in the presence of an unknown eavesdropper. In particular, the UAV swarm performs coordinated beamforming onto the null space of the legitimate channel to jam the eavesdropper located at an unknown location. By nulling the channel between the legitimate receiver and the UAV swarm, we obtain an optimal trajectory and jamming power allocation for each UAV enabling wideband single ray beamforming to improve the secrecy rate. Results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed UAV-aided jamming scheme as well as the optimal number of UAVs in the swarm necessary to observe a saturation effect in the secrecy rate. We also show the optimal radius of the unknown but constrained location of the eavesdropper.