Energy-Efficient Secure Offloading System Designed via UAV-Mounted Intelligent Reflecting Surface for Resilience Enhancement

Abstract: With increasing interest in mmWave and THz communication systems, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-mounted intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been suggested as a key enabling technology to establish robust line-of-sight (LoS) connections with ground nodes owing to their free mobility and high altitude, especially for emergency and disaster response. This paper investigates a secure offloading system, where the UAV-mounted IRS assists the offloading procedures between ground users and an access point (AP) acting as an edge cloud. In this system, the users except the intended recipients in the offloading process are considered as potential eavesdroppers. The system aims to achieve the minimum total energy consumption of battery-limited ground user devices under constraints for secure offloading accomplishment and operability of UAV-mounted IRS, which is done by optimizing the transmit power of ground user devices, the trajectory and phase shift matrix of UAV-mounted IRS, and the offloading ratio between local execution and edge computing based on the successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithms. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can provide the considerable energy savings compared with local execution and partial optimizations.