Secure UAV Communication Networks via Friendly Jamming and Bandwidth Allocation

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) become a promising enabler for building on-demand deployable and cost-effective wireless communication systems in various real-world applications. However, the openness of the aerial communication environment may render UAV communications more vulnerable to eavesdropping as compared to its terrestrial counterparts. Existing literature on UAV secure communications mainly focused on the single-UAV or dual-UAV scenarios, and the secure communication problem for multiple networked UAVs still remains largely unexplored, partly due to the challenges caused by the complicated network topology and the mutual dependencies among UAVs. With this consideration, a joint friendly jamming and bandwidth allocation algorithm is proposed in this work, and to the best of our knowledge, this work is among the first to study the secure communication problem for UAV networks. In addition to the analysis, extensive simulations are conducted to corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can automatically direct the friendly jammer UAV moving to a favorable location in adaptive to the network topology and guide the other relay UAVs cooperatively adjusting their bandwidths accordingly, leading to a substantial improvement of the secure communication capability of the UAV network.