Directional Antenna-Assisted UAV Path Planning Against Jamming Attacks

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been extensively studied as aerial base stations for wireless communication systems. In most previous studies, researchers have focused on optimizing UAV trajectories to maximize communication efficiency; however, the impact of intentional interference such as jamming has received comparatively little attention. In this paper, we propose a directional antenna-assisted UAV path planning method that simultaneously satisfies legitimate users' communication demands and mitigates the impact of jamming attacks. The UAV is equipped with a directional antenna whose coverage pattern varies with altitude and antenna gain, introducing a trade-off between communication efficiency and robustness against interference. To address this, we jointly optimize the UAV's hovering positions and antenna parameters using particle swarm optimization within user clusters formed by spatial clustering. Then we connect the obtained hovering points via a traveling salesman problem-based path construction to minimize the total flight distance. Through simulation experiments, we show that the proposed method effectively avoids jamming signals while ensuring successful data transmission for all users.